General Estate Planning

For many people in the Columbia area, their estate consists almost entirely of their home. Their retirement accounts will fall to second place, but it will be a distant second place. This brings up the importance of maintaining a home for a person’s wealth portfolio.

Home values in the Columbia metropolitan area are off from their 2008 peak, but have rebounded nicely since then. Homes are basically savings vessels for people.

Howard County is unique in that it is one of the wealthiest counties in the country, on a per capita basis, yet it lacks some of the traditional hallmarks of more famous wealthy counties in the country. There are no notable country clubs and there are no famous resorts. The county is largely a bedroom county for people working in Washington DC and Baltimore. The western part of the county is farmland. The two largest cities in Howard County are Ellicott City and Columbia.

Columbia is an upper middle class city in Howard County, Maryland: a county with one of the highest per capita incomes in the country. Because of that, clients in this county needing legal services have high incomes and work in professions that subject them to civil litigation (lawsuits).

What kind of professions are these? Lawyers, doctors, dentists, rental property owners, small successful business owners. The main way to protect from lawsuits while in these professions is to take out a personal liability insurance policy. However, there are times when the policy will not cover damages incurred in an adverse judgment in a court of law, which is when they might turn to an asset protection lawyer.

What does the typical probated estate look like? For one thing, it is probably a female’s estate. Men die with most of their assets being jointly owned by a wife, or possibly a child. At that point there is no reason for a probate because there are no assets that are separately owned. But, when their spouse passes away, families must deal with probate.

A good probate lawyer will be familiar with this scenario.

For many clients, a trust is the optimal choice for administering an estate. Some wealthy clients need trusts known as irrevocable trusts in order to avoid the estate tax or to protect assets from creditors. Others will use trusts to avoid probate. The mechanisms of trust administration are similar to the mechanisms of administering a will, but there are some notable differences that clients need to be aware of.

Probably the biggest difficulty in being a trustee is seeing that the property meant to be inside the trust has been correctly retitled.

Estate planning is commonly thought of as something that individuals prepare for. However, estate planning is used to distribute a person’s property, and often one piece of that property is a business. Businesses need to have a clear path to beneficiary distribution just like a house or a car. If they don’t have one, the value of the business could be lost to your family.

What are buy/sell agreements? A business owner makes a deal with his partners or with another firm for his share in the business to be bought out in the event of his death.

I’ve written on the importance of a trust administration lawyer before, here, and I am going to touch on the process again. Trust administration is becoming more and more of an issue for Americans because of the growing popularity of revocable living trusts. While I believe that revocable living trusts are unnecessary for most people, if a trustee has been chosen to administer a trust, he or she must face a task that can be even more daunting than a probate. That means trustees may need the assistance of an attorney.

Trust administration is not overseen by courts in the same way that probate is.

Choosing an attorney is like choosing any service provider. Various factors need to be taken into account before making a decision, including cost, reputation, and even likability of the provider. Lawyers are licensed service providers who generally work hard to provide the best service possible.

Your will is a vital part of the organization of your estate. While writing your own will is perfectly legal, it’s generally not a good idea: having a wills attorney draft it for you is the best course of action.

You might have heard that the terms “irrevocable” and “revocable” with regard to trusts. Lawyers and people who have created an estate plan like to throw these terms around, but they are often misused by both parties. They also can be manipulated by lawyers to confuse clients into purchasing something that is expensive and unnecessary.

“Revocable” generally refers to a revocable living trust. A revocable living trust is a trust that is used to avoid probate, or at least to minimize how much of an estate is exposed to probate administration.