Families in Wisconsin can reduce the risk of estate feuds and contests by focusing on clarity, communication, and legally sound planning: start with a comprehensive estate plan that includes revocable living trusts, a will, financial and health care powers of attorney, and beneficiary designations on retirement accounts and insurance, ideally created with...
Category: Trusts
Wisconsin Estate Planning: Estate Planning for Schoolteachers: How Your Benefits Come into Play
As a schoolteacher, you do far more than teach lessons. You manage a classroom, mentor students, and juggle a busy schedule—often while balancing other responsibilities at home. But one important task is often too easy to postpone: estate planning.
Estate planning is not just for the wealthy. It is...
Wisconsin Estate Planning: Estate Planning Scams: What Seniors Need to Know
Creating an estate plan is an important step in protecting your loved ones and ensuring that your assets are distributed according to your wishes. Unfortunately, scammers know that people who want to safeguard their estates are often willing to act quickly.
Even a carefully drafted estate plan can be...
Wisconsin Estate Planning: The Risks of an Unfinished Estate Plan—and Why You Should Complete Yours
Planning for the future, especially your own mortality, is never easy. Even when you understand the importance of creating a will or trust to protect your loved ones, finding the motivation to complete an estate plan can be difficult. Yet an unfinished estate plan is almost as risky as having no plan...
Common Pot (Common) Trusts Explained for Families in Wisconsin
A pot trust (also known as a Common Trust) is a way to hold money and property for a group of beneficiaries, usually children or other family members, in one shared trust. Instead of dividing everything into separate shares right away, the assets stay together in a single fund, allowing the trustee...
Why Title of Real Estate Matters in Madison, Wisconsin
Real estate can be owned in several different ways. The form of ownership, or how your property is titled, can determine how much control you have over it, how vulnerable your property is to creditor claims and lawsuits, and what will happen to it at your death.
Individual Ownership
What is an Ancillary Probate?
Many people own property in more than one state, such as an ocean-side vacation home or a rental property in a former home state. It is important to think about how that property will be handled after you pass away. Through proper estate planning, you can help minimize the burdensome court proceedings...
Citizenship and Estate Planning
Noncitizen spouses are treated differently than US citizen spouses for estate and gift tax purposes.[1]
They do not get the unlimited marital deduction. Married US citizen spouses can generally transfer unlimited amounts of money between each other during life or upon death in various qualifying ways without...
Talking to Aging Parents About Estate Planning
Beyond the practical purpose of transferring assets and reducing taxes, an estate plan reflects love, responsibility, and values. That emotional heaviness may be part of why many families avoid the subject. Pew Research reports that only about 3 in 10 US adults have created a basic estate plan (a will and a...
Homestead Exemptions and Estate Planning
The term homestead may seem like a throwback to pioneer days, but homestead exemption laws are directly relevant to today’s estate planning and can play a valuable role in a modern plan.
Almost every state has some form of homestead exemption law primarily focused on reducing property taxes and...