Boulder Estate Planning Legal Blog

When creating an estate plan, it’s easy to focus on what will happen to your assets upon your death. For example, you need to decide on who gets what.

You have a lot going on in your 20s, but you may soon come to find that creating an estate plan would be in your best interest.

For many people, estate planning comes down to one thing: deciding if they should create a will or trust.

It’s easy to believe that a living will and a traditional will are one in the same. However, as you learn more about both, you’ll come to find that nothing could be further from the truth.

Robin Williams was THE comedian if you are a Gen-Xer like me. We grew up watching Mork & Mindy. And those of us who live in Boulder have, since his death, gone by the Mork & Mindy house and said our farewells there. What do we have to criticize about Robin Williams’ Estate? First, let me make my motives clear.

Most of us think, “thick stack of legal papers”? Ugh! “No, thank you!” But when it comes to estate planning, it’s just the opposite. You see, legal problems in estates are often caused not by bad estate planning, but by Failure-To-Plan (“FTP”), even in estates where the person or couple thought they’d done everything right.

Online or DIY Rather Than ProfessionalsThere are dozens upon dozens of websites that will profess to offer you just the right discounted estate planning documents… Internet sites can provide you with documents but no actual advice that fits you in the context of your specific financial and personal life. What happens when the laws change? Does the document create an unnecessary tax if the state and federal law diverge substantially? Also, use an experienced estate attorney. Forbes.com

Learn The Science of Happiness from UC Berkeley with Thousands of Others! No Travel Needed.The Timeless Question: How to be HappyWe all want to be happy, and there are countless ideas about what happiness is and how we can get more of it. But not many of those ideas are based on science (simply meaning proven-by-research here). That’s where this new online course comes in.

As ever, your watchdogs, Bennett and Diedre Braverman were glued to the national scene when President Obama gave his State of the Union address in case anything of value fell out for us to tell you about.

F Forbes recently shared its list of 7 Major Errors in Estate Planning. I’d like to share them, one at a time, with comments, and then add a couple they missed. Rather than swamp you with a treatise, here’s one that I really feel passionate about.