Get Your Shit Together

Also, you better be damn sure that you can trust the person you give power of attorney to -- the document provided here assigns power of attorney immediately, not on incapacitation/death, and allows the person you designate to gift themselves up to $13,000 a year of your own property without your consent.

Considering the laws of the 50 states are sometimes very different, and these documents cover a wide range of legal topics, I think you'd have to be an idiot to use these documents without running them by a lawyer in your state, because they might not have the consequences you think they have.

Frankly I don't see why the HN crowd would upvote a site like this -- I'd bet it was ring votes that got it to the front page. Or maybe it was just the snarky domain, who knows.

www.uslegalforms.com has been around for a long time now, and they at least have state-specific documents. Use them if you're going to use anything without consulting a lawyer. But really, pay a lawyer, it's worth it.

I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice.

When he passed away, I found out that the will is invalidated because that's how it works in Georgia's legal system. Luckily my dad's wife is a nice woman and worked with me to ensure the estate went through probate properly.

But always double check when your life's circumstances change (new residence, etc)

Even with a will, in some places the probate process is very expensive and onerous. In many cases, it's a lot easier to use a simple trust mechanism vs. a will. 3 hours of attorney time now can avoid 50 hours + lots of calendar time later.

You won't be doing a "whole lot of work", but anyway, what works really well is giving a lawyer professional paperwork from another state (or whatever) and telling him to fix it for your state's laws.

They handle this kind of "translation" all the time because of people who moved in from another state, they might be a bit confused if you moved in from the state of "the internet" but it'll be less confusing than walking in with a completely blank slate. At least they'll have to ask a lot fewer questions and explain a lot fewer things. Spending money to telling a lawyer "i donno" can be very expensive compared to how cheap it is to tell him something like "I want the inheritance to work something similar to Wisconsin law"

Think by analogy of doing desktop support for a guy who can't articulate anything clearer than "the internet is broken on the hard drive", its gonna cost him a lot. But if the guy walked in with professional documentation of his specific problem, its gonna be a lot cheaper.

If you don't, or cash strapped now, you can get by with Nolo press. If you can understand ROR, and programming, after reading their two books on wills and trusts, I think you can set up a trust and will, and skip the lawyer.

On the will get two signatures from people not in the will, and it does not need to be notarized in California. If you want to exclude a child out of a estate you must explicitly state that in the will.(Some kids got a lot of cash early on. Explain to them you love them. Make sure they are doing well, if you exclude them.) I recently did a will for a friend. Her daughter took all the family money when her father died--leaving her mother with nothing. The ironic part is her daughter is a multimillionaire in LA, with a successful business. She took advantatage of a bad situation, and a angry dying man. So yes, I didn't feel it was immoral to exclude her from the will of that friend.

  If you are leaving a large asset (money, house, investments, a 500 foot yacht in the Bahamas you never told anyone about) then the person getting it should know before hand.

If the balance "favours your kids", presumably meaning that the new caretakers feel overwhelmed by that responsibility, I guess they could refuse that responsibility. I guess having that wish be in your will might pressure them sufficiently to actually go through with that responsibility, but that kind of pressuring somehow doesn't feel right either.

The relative worked in the financial services industry and had provided me advice about estate planning.

When it came to the estate things were not prepared at all. If fact it was a bit of a mess.

I guess it's the case of builders living in unfinished houses and that.

On the other hand a trust can be either notarized or witnessed (EPTL §7-1.17) and a power of attorney must be notarized (General Obligations Law §5-1501B, which also requires a typeface "no less than twelve point in size").

And in other news, I still owe him a trip into the Great Smoky Mountains to scatter his ashes.

She also wants her body to be burned in a viking longship out at sea. We'll see how that goes.

To each his own, but consider that maybe that's not the right question. My paternal grandmother recently died, and my dad sat shiva for her (Jewish mourning ritual). It almost certainly would not have been what she wanted, she was a fierce atheist. But it was what my dad wanted, what comforted him, and he was the one around and mourning, not my grandmother.

Just something to consider.

To be fair, if I someone made me go through coffin designs for my own coffin, or any kind of arrangement, chances are it would end in a practical joke. I just don't give a damn.

We humans have a hard time remembering that anything we communicate has _a lot_ of implicit context. On the Internet, this becomes especially conspicuous because our communications quickly escape the realm where that implicit context is known & valid. Up to now, the way to deal with that seems to be EULAs written in Legalese.

This is one of the reasons I've been putting off completing a will :-( Is there a good option for going about this without naming an executor?

Sometimes low tech works.

Utility/subscription type services pretty much get a copy of the certificate and they go away, maybe with a final billing statement. Look out for scammers sending fake invoices to dead people listed in obituaries or legal notice section of the paper.

Where it gets messier is non-financial institution online accounts, but they wouldn't be financially important or time critical. I remember ebay was fairly civil about the whole thing, although I don't remember what they did.

[1] http://point-at-infinity.org/ssss/

[1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Ultimate-Financial-Plan-Balancing/...

Anytime you buy insurance you have to be ready to do some math. If you make enough to cover a caregiver (often covered or partially covered under health insurance) for your wife and have a strategy for taking care of your kids then you may not even need it.

I'm fortunate enough to live close to both my parents and my wife's parents. Because of this and because we have decent savings we decided against disability and life insurance for her. We are in the process of getting better life insurance for myself but are keeping it as low as possible to cover our debts and living expenses until the children are old enough to go to work in the coal mines.

If fact you should create an account on ssa.gov and irs.gov no matter what so nobody else does it for you if your identity is stolen.

My mom was on her checking account (because my mom took care of a lot of her finances) so my mom automatically got all of her money in the world - $900. The only other thing she owned was her house. Her will said it was to be sold and the money split between her children. Exactly zero of her children were interested in the house, selling the house, living in the house, or anything to do with the house. So the house was abandoned along with all the stuff in her house. My grandma knew that would happen (the house was literally falling apart - if code enforcement saw it then it would be condemned) but she made a will because she was "supposed" to.

There are different tactics that can be used to try to get past the denial. Stating things bluntly is a worthwhile tactic. Merely mentioning facts is another possible tactic, but you run into the problem that people would prefer to screen out any information about such a painful topic.

This a subject where shock tactics can be justified, if they manage to get people to think about the fact that, yes, they will die someday.

Making sure that the financial needs of your loved ones are met if you do depart in a sudden manner, is the most selfless thing you can do. It has nothing to do about making you feel happy, it has everything to do with being pragmatic so that they have one less thing to worry about.

I don't believe in life after death, but I do believe that the world will continue to exist after I die. And in that world, chances are good that my wife and kid will still be alive, but I will not be earning money to support them. Planning for that scenario is not stupid at all. It has nothing to do with how I or anyone else will feel, unless you count "hungry" as a feeling.

This is extraordinarily variable based on where you are in your life. If you have a lot of assets or a family that depends on your income, a will and life insurance can make sense. If you are like me, a single, 26 year old who has a decent job, some assets, but that's it, it's a waste of time and money.