Estate Planning

IT’S SPRING CLEANING TIME! DUST OFF YOUR OLD ESTATE PLAN   Spring time is when people often take a look around and start freshening things up. Home repairs, paint jobs, new furniture, new clothes, maybe a different haircut…… there’s something about seeing the new buds on trees and the blooming daffodils that gets us thinking this way. It’s the perfect time to pull out your old estate plan...

A few years ago, my husband and I sat down with all of our children and their spouses for a family meeting. I started with, “Our plan is to live forever. But just in case ………” and we proceeded to tell them about our new estate plan, who would have which responsibility, where important data is kept, who takes care of things for us, who our doctors are, and who to...

So, you’ve been named as someone’s attorney-in-fact (“Agent”)… now what? To make a long answer short- it depends.   The first question any Agent must ask herself is whether the Power of Attorney document (“POA”) grants her the authority to act on the Principal’s behalf immediately (known as a durable power of attorney), or if the Power of Attorney only comes into effect upon a...

When you sign a Power of Attorney, the person you name to be your “attorney-in-fact” or “agent” is entrusted with certain legal obligations known as fiduciary duties to you. This is known as the Principal-Agent relationship.

If you are in a non-traditional relationship — i.e., the unmarried couple living together for years, whether gay, straight or anyone in between — don’t you want to be the one who decides who takes care of you or manages your decisions if some catastrophe occurs? Of course you do. But if you don’t set up a plan, and you just “leave it up to the law,” the exact opposite of your...

On March 3, 2021, Governor Murphy signed into law the LGBTQI+ Senior Bill of Rights, a sweeping civil rights law aimed at protecting New Jersey’s LGBTQI+ seniors living or thinking about moving into one of New Jersey’s 360+ long-term care facilities.

“Aging in place” is what most people want. Remaining in the community is a high priority goal for most elders. The challenge is that there might be many needs to be met to achieve this goal. Parents and children need to talk to each other about aging-related issues so that the parents can...

The signing of a Trust document is the start of a new process. A Trust isn’t just a “form.” It’s a legal structure with real consequences that has to be handled carefully in order to assure that the trust creator’s purposes can be achieved. If the Trustee uses the Trust’s...

A “disclaimer” is a legal document which is signed by somebody before they receive property to which they are entitled from an estate or trust. There are many situations in which a person is about to inherit money but doesn’t want to receive it for some reason, or wants it to go to somebody...

get organized in case there’s an emergency