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How Estate Planning Attorneys Help Keep Your Estate Plan Up to Date

Your estate plan is one of the most important sets of legal tools you will ever create. An estate plan is designed to protect you, your loved ones, and your money and property. It can minimize taxes and fees and ensure that your loved ones are taken care of. Depending on the estate planning tools you use, it can also keep your personal mat-ters out of the court system and away from prying eyes. However, an estate plan is not a “set it and forget it” set of legal tools, and working with estate planning attorneys over time helps ensure your plan continues to function as intended as your life changes.
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Avoid These Common Mistakes: How Estate Planning Attorneys Help You Leave Assets to Minor Children

You love your children and want to ensure that they are always taken care of. The desire to provide for them may also be shared by their grandparents, aunts, and uncles. However, when leaving money and property to minor children, even the best intentions can lead to big problems. Common mistakes can cause chaos for your family.
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Avoid Living Probate: How to Keep Guardians and Conservators Out of Your Estate

While many proactive individuals understand the importance of having a comprehensive estate plan, they often assume that their plan addresses only what happens after they pass away. However, a comprehensive estate plan is also meant to positively impact your life by planning for and providing necessary protections while you are still around to reap the benefits.
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Choosing the Wrong Successor Trustee Can Undermine Your Estate Plan

Many estate plans contain revocable living trusts that will become irrevocable (cannot be easily changed or terminated) when the trustmaker dies. Such trusts may benefit the surviving spouse during their lifetime and may continue for the benefit of several additional generations. Because these trusts can be designed to span multiple decades, it is crucial to choose the right succession of trustees.
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Have a Harmonious Family that Does Not Fight? You Still Need an Estate Plan

In many families, everyone gets along, happily gathering for the holidays, sharing laughs, telling stories, and enjoying each other’s company. Then, the matriarch or patriarch dies. Suddenly, years of pent-up resentment and hurt feelings surface, and the once-happy family is now embroiled in litigation over the head of the family’s money and property.
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Minimalism May Be Great for Your Stuff and Finances but Not for Your Estate Plan

In a modern world marked by information overload, overflowing inboxes, nonstop notifications, and the constant pressure to accumulate more stuff, minimalism offers a compelling counternarrative.
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Is an Income-Tax Time Bomb Lurking in Your Estate Plan?

As the federal estate tax exemption has ballooned from $5 million in 2011 to $13.99 million today, the need for estate tax planning has drastically decreased. However, with a top marginal income tax rate of 37 percent, the focus of estate planning has shifted to a new frontier: income tax basis planning.
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Estate Planning and Portability: How to Minimize the Federal Estate Tax

Most people may be surprised to learn that the federal estate tax is considered by some to be voluntary. Estate planning attorneys used to say, “You only pay if you do not plan.” The relatively recent introduction of portability provides yet another planning tool available to married couples through estate planning services to minimize or eliminate estate taxation. Portability allows a surviving spouse to “pocket” and save their deceased spouse’s unused exclusion amount (technically referred to as the deceased spousal unused exclusion amount, or DSUE) and add it to their own exemption.
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Estate Planning Strategies to Protect Your Spouse

You found the love of your life, and as you have built your life together, you have likely weathered your fair share of storms and grown stronger because of them. Now that you are married, you are uniquely situated to provide meaningful support for your spouse after your passing through special estate planning tools available only to legally married individuals. Working with professional estate planning services, such as those offered by Pavone Law Group, ensures these tools are used effectively.
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4 Estate Planning Tips to Avoid a Will or Trust Contest

Fighting over provisions in your will or trust can derail your final wishes, rapidly deplete your financial legacy, and tear your loved ones apart. However, with proper planning, you can help your family avoid a potentially disastrous fight.
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