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When planning for your estate, you can get bogged down in tax issues and forget about other concerns. However, it is important to remember that there are principles at stake, other than taxes.

Estate planning is not a valueless endeavor. When people start deciding how they would like their estates divided, their decisions are ultimately an expression of their values. However, sometimes during the process, people get so focused on the tax implications of estate planning that they forget about their other values.

Recently, Nightly Business Report discussed this and some important non-tax considerations in “What you don’t...

It is important to make the right decisions with your estate plan, such as whether you should use a will or a trust. One decision is even more important, and it is common.

Perhaps the single greatest divide in estate planning is between those people who use a last will as their primary estate planning tool and those who use a revocable living trust instead. Choosing between using a will or a trust has a great impact on estate plans and often on what can be done with the estate plan.

Last wills must go through probate and be subjected...

It is common for elderly people to fall in love and want to get married. As part of the process, they need to make more plans than younger couples.

A common image of the elderly is to see them as past the years to fall in love. Could seniors meet someone new, fall in love and get married? In movies and on TV, elderly people who do fall in love are typically played off for laughs or presented as being under the spell of someone much younger who wants their money.

In real life, it is not unusual for seniors...

Now that the estate tax exemption has been doubled, some people are saying there is no longer a need for estate planning. However, estate plans have never been mostly about avoiding the estate tax.

For people who do not want to take the time to plan for their own estates, it might seem like 2018 has started out to be a good year. It has been so good that some people are talking about the death of estate planning itself, because the federal estate and gift tax exemptions have been doubled. They also think that there is no need to...

Relatives of a former secretary were surprised to learn that she had quietly built up a fortune over the years and left most of it to charity.

Sylvia Bloom went to work at a small Wall Street law firm as a legal secretary when she was a young woman. She stayed with the firm for 67 years and retired at the age of 96. She passed away in 2016.

Bloom began working at the firm when it was common for secretaries to purchase investments for their employers. Lawyers would tell Bloom what they wanted to invest in. Her job was...