Blog Post Archives - Page 2 of 15 - Law Offices of Daniel Timins

When “Transfer On Death” Accounts Go Bad

Posted on January 7, 2020

If you have ever had to deal with a complicated or contested Probate over a family member’s Will, you know that a lot of your problems would have been avoided if funds had instead been held in Transfer On Death [“TOD”] accounts: While Probating a Will requires a lot of court paperwork, time, and the cost of paying an attorney to help navigate through the proceeding, TOD accounts transfer as Operation of Law assets, meaning all the beneficiary of the account has to do is show up with an original death certificate. But sometimes TOD accounts are not properly set up, cause confusion or secrecy where none was desired, or end up being transferred to people you don’t want them

Your Inherited IRA Just Got Nerfed

Posted on December 30, 2019

Every few years the federal government passes last-minute legislation that totally messes up your estate plan. On December 20, 2019 President Trump signed Congress’s “Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement Act of 2019” into law. On top of the fact the government paid a 12 year old to sell the rights to his treehouse password in order to create a nitwitty acronym, the “SECURE Act” makes radical changes to how your post-mortem beneficiaries receive your retirement plans that might actually make you feel less secure. When your parent, family or friend dies and leaves you their IRA account you use to receive an “Inherited IRA”, meaning the original owner’s name remained on the account, but the account was change

A Legal Magic Trick: Revoking Irrevocable Trusts

Posted on November 27, 2019

The world changes, and so does our family, friends and charitable organizations. And we do too: We start to care more about relationships than money, health instead of inebriation, and sometimes come to an understanding with those people we disagree with. However, estate planning benefits do not always lend themselves to changed circumstances, so if you want creditor protection, government benefits, estate tax savings or the ability to control your family’s inheritance “from the grave” you usually need an irrevocable trust, I.e. one you cannot change even if you desperately need to change the documents. When you create certain irrevocable trusts, you cannot modify them. These trusts are (typically) either the trustee or the beneficiary but never both; you may

Getting Divorced? Leave Children’s Life Insurance to a Trust

Posted on November 15, 2019

As a member of the First Spouse Turned Demogorgon Club, I can tell you with hindsight that divorce can be a wonderful thing: No more arguments, no more awkward Thanksgivings with creepy in-laws, no more washing the dishes during prime football hours. But at the same time, divorce is almost never positive during the initial process, self-doubt and anger consumes you, and (ultimately) you will have to deal with financial matters, particularly if you have minor children. And when child support or maintenance is in the picture, your former best friend is going to want to make sure that cool hard cash is still there if you pass away during the payment period. So, purchasing life insurance to cover your

What is a Fair Executor Commission?

Posted on October 25, 2019

When we used to go out to dinner with my grandfather, he would always put some of his food on my plate. It wasn’t that it was cold or not tasty (though his love affair with tripe was engaged in by him and him alone), the thing was that it wasn’t what I had expected, the food that was placed on my plate was not always the part I would have preferred, and it always got entangled with my own eating affairs (I.e. the mash potatoes). Eating other people’s leftovers is often an unsavory task, but it can be about 1 gazillion times more palatable than having to deal with another person’s estate. Sometimes the deceased person was a hoarder

Is There Any Reason NOT to Do a Medicaid Trust in New York?!?!

Posted on September 13, 2019

Many aging individuals appreciate how much work they have done through their lives, how much risk they took, and how they were somehow able to save up enough money to live in retirement for over 20 years. Then, without warning, they have a stroke, or a fall, or are diagnosed with dementia, and it becomes clear to them that their aging health issues can erase their entire net worth in a mere few years. The family then finds out that receiving home care Medicaid is pretty easy, but to protect family assets from Medicaid nursing home care benefits requires you to be indigent for at least 5 years. And (unfortunately by predictably) the family home was never transferred or properly

The Many Risks of “Deathbed” Estate Planning

Posted on August 30, 2019

I can appreciate that planning for your own demise years before your death is not as exciting as planning your next K-Pop karaoke face-off (or any other activity imaginable for that matter). Yet many people fear death so much during their healthy and convalescing periods that they take no estate planning actions whatsoever in the hopes that ignoring this 12,000 pound gorilla will make it just go away. It doesn’t, so many estate planners are – frankly too often – called in during a new client’s final living days to draft their Will, create and fund trusts, or update beneficiary designation forms. These last-ditch “Deathbed” Will signings do not achieve their desired end result an inordinately-high amount of the time

Why Jeffrey Epstein’s Trust Only Adds to the Murder Conspiracy

Posted on August 30, 2019

While America’s criminal justice system does not judge people to be guilty until proven guilty (even though it has no compunction with adjudicating innocent people as being guilty), Jeffrey Epstein sure does look like a bad, bad dude. The “Pimp of the Rich and Famous” would have been charged with human trafficking, statutory rape, prostitution, and likely many more demented crimes which thinking of would cause most decent people to throw up in their mouth a little bit. His trial and any plea bargain could have been an enormous bombshell that would have ruined at least a few people with HUGE shoes to fill. It was in this context that Jeffrey Epstein somehow hung himself from a five-foot high bunkbed

Damian Hurley: Why Minimizing Estate Taxes is Not Always a Good Thing

Posted on July 29, 2019

For decades estate attorneys have been driven by a prime directive, a primary motivating cause that overcomes all other client desires: Minimizing estate taxes. I believe this is a huge mistake, and a recent court decision highlighted by a stern millionaire patriarch, celebrities, a free-living playboy, and an irrevocable trust shows us why. Today it takes a decent amount of money ($11.4 million or more) to face a federal estate tax when you die, and there are also certain irrevocable trusts, including GRATs and GRUTs, that further minimize or eliminate estate taxes. So, for many of us this article is not relevant, but for those who it is, it should come as no surprise that estate attorneys have traditionally focused

Wills: What Do Executors Get Paid in New York?

Posted on July 3, 2019

When your Will is probated your Executor is entitled to receive a commission for their work. And while you can define what that commission is in your Will, most people choose New York’s statutory guideline for that commission (the concern is that if the fee is too low no one will want to be Executor, since you can’t force someone to do the job). In New York, that statute is created by the Surrogate’s Court Procedures Act, Section 2307, and it has a lot of juicy details that differentiate it from other state’s more-streamlined statutory commissions: Keep in mind that any assets which pass through a living trust, a joint account, or assets passing by “operation of law” (such as