What We Do

A well thought out estate plan can offer peace of mind and protection for you and your family in the most precarious situations of life. Beyond this, effective estate planning can help you reach important financial goals and clearly designate your end of life wishes.

At The Estate Plan, our goal is to make the estate planning process as comprehensive and clear-cut as possible. We can assist with all aspects of the estate planning process.

Estate litigation arises when a conflict about any aspect of an estate occurs and the courts must step in to resolve the conflict. There are several conflicts that can arise within an estate that would require litigation, such as:

– Contesting the validity of a Last Will and Testament.
– Contesting whether a Trustee is properly performing their duties.
– Objecting to the manner in which a personal representative has handled/dispersed assets of the estate.

Estate administration’s come in lots of shapes and flavors and sizes and colors but there’s two major ways that most estates are administered. There is probate administration and Trust administration.

Within probate administration, you’re often going to find that there are summary administrations (where the assets are less than $75,000 or where the person’s been dead longer than two years) and there’s formal administrations (where there’s more complex estates and we need to have a personal representative appointed to deal with different things that can appear, like creditors or other administrative bodies’ involvement, taxes, real estate sales, etc.)

When a family knows that they are planning for the future of a child or adult with a disability, it is even more important to consider the effect of inheritance. Without proper planning, even a small inheritance can cause a loss of benefits on which they have come to rely.

In such cases, there are options that allow for multiple family members to make gifts without disrupting needed benefits. We are knowledgeable in special needs planning and can help you develop a plan that will maintain required support for a family member or loved one with a disability.

People sometimes believe their estate planning will be easy. They may think the only asset they own is their house, and they just want to leave it to their children. But even this seemingly simple plan can become complicated.

Let’s say you, your brother, and your sister inherited your mother’s house after she passed away. In order to be fair, your mother left each of you an equal share in the house. You and your siblings are now co-owners of the house (most likely as tenants-in-common), so what are you going to do with the house?