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ESTATE PLANNING OPTIONS FOR PETS

Davidov Law Group

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If you are concerned about what will happen to your pets after you pass away, you have several options to provide for their care. All of the options have their benefits and drawbacks, but most people can find one that suits their needs.

The traditional option is to provide for your pets’ care in a Will. You bequeath your pets to someone else the same as you do with your other assets. The drawback is that the person must be willing to take care of your pets and you do not have a say in whether or not that will happen. However, this is the simplest option.

Another option is to create a Pet Trust. This allows you to set aside money for the care and support of your pets. However, it also requires that someone be willing to take care of the pets.

Another option is to leave your pet with a no-kill shelter. Many shelters will agree to take care of your pets for the duration of their natural lives if you make a donation to the shelter of a certain level. However, living in a shelter may not be as pleasurable for your pets as living with another person.

Ask your estate planning attorney about the options available for your pets

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People are often similar and predictable. It is no different when it comes to their estate plans. Most people want the same thing. Almost universally, when a husband and wife in a first marriage devise an estate plan they want the same thing: when the first spouse passes away, everything goes to the surviving spouse. When the second spouse passes away, everything goes to the children. Executing this plan with joint Wills is not always the best option.

Most people do not want to think about it, but there is always a possibility that a surviving spouse will get remarried. It happens all the time. The new spouse is entitled to a share of the surviving spouse’s estate by law. This may or may not leave enough of the property available for the original couple’s children to receive the originally contemplated inheritance.

The initial goal of most couples is laudable. It is an excellent idea to leave your assets to your surviving spouse with the plan that everything will eventually pass on to your children. It is not the idea that is wrong. It is often the execution. Circumstances change and what we expect to happen often doesn’t. Talk to an estate planning attorney about ways that you and your spouse can accomplish the same goals in ways that take changing circumstances into consideration.

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Getting a General Durable Power of Attorney is one of the most important things that you can do as part of your overall estate plan. You should consider the possibility that you might be incapacitated and unable to look after your own interests in the latter years of your life. If you do not plan ahead, then someone else will have to go to court and ask for guardianship over you to protect your interests.

If you think that having a relative asking a court for guardianship is not that big of deal, a recent case illustrates the problem with that approach. Sometimes, your relatives might not agree about all aspects of the guardianship and who should be the guardian. Usually, that argument is left in court, which can be bad enough. In the case of the Fox family, the disagreement resulted in a 63 year old high school counselor punching his 74 year old uncle after a court hearing.

Fortunately, not every family feud over guardianship will end up in criminal charges. However, any family disagreement over the issue is unnecessary and avoidable. All that you need to do is have an attorney prepare a General Durable Power of Attorney so that everyone knows who you want to look after your interests when you are no longer able to do so.

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College is extremely expensive and the cost keeps rising. Parents and grandparents routinely struggle with how they will pay for their children or grandchildren’s college education. If you plan ahead, you can make paying for the college education a part of your larger estate plan. You have many different options.

The traditional way to pay for a college education is by setting up a Trust. This allows you to set up the account long before it will be needed and let the Trust assets earn interest. However, there are other ways to pay for college if you have not planned far in advance. Parents and grandparents can directly pay tuition to the education institution. Money paid directly to an accredited school is not subject to the gift tax. You can then give living expenses to the student directly up to the gift tax limit. Another option is to set up a 529 college savings plan. However, like a Trust, that should be done long before it is needed.

Paying for college is important and most people want to see their children and grandchildren go to college without having to worry about how it will be paid for. Talk to an estate planning attorney about making your loved ones’ college expenses part of your estate plan.

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Are you one of the approximately 70% of Americans who do not have a Will? Have you considered the consequences of not having one? If you do not plan for what will happen to your property after you pass away, then someone else will get to decide what happens to it. If you have young children and you do not have plans for what might happen to them should you be in a life-ending accident, then someone else gets to make those decisions.

If you do not have an estate plan that at a minimum includes just a basic Will, then who gets your property after you pass away is determined by state law. In most cases, your property will go to your closest living relatives. For some people that might seem like an OK solution. But, what if you want to leave something to a niece or nephew? No matter how small the inheritance you want to leave them, you will need an estate plan to leave them anything if you have closer living relatives. In a Will, you can also appoint a guardian for your children. If you do not do so, then the Probate Court has to name someone. You cannot count on the Court naming the same person you would name.

There is no reason not to have a Will. Talk to an estate planning attorney about becoming one of the responsible 30% of Americans who have one.

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If you want to be appointed as a guardian of an adult relative in New York City, it is important that you speak to an experienced New York probate attorney. In New York, a guardian does not automatically receive complete control over all of an incapacitated person’s life. The court can grant limited powers covering only those areas that the adult needs assistance with. An attorney can assist you in tailoring your request to the needs of your incapacitated relative.

Most guardianships are for financial reasons. When people get older, many no longer have the ability to pay their bills on time and handle other aspects of their finances, such as filing taxes. If the incapacitated person is capable of handling his own health care decisions, however, the court will normally not appoint the guardian the power to make medical decisions until it becomes necessary. In other situations, a court might only appoint a guardian to prevent abusive or dangerous situations, such as self-harm by the incapacitated adult or financial abuse by another, unscrupulous relative.

Whatever the reason for an adult guardianship, be sure to limit your initial request for guardianship to include only the necessary powers. This will assist the court in knowing that you are an appropriate person to appoint as a guardian because you are only asking for authority to help your adult relative in those areas where help is actually needed.

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In the last post you learned that probate does not have to be scary if you have an experienced estate planning attorney assist you in making your estate plan. However, that does not mean that your heirs will necessarily have to go through probate if you hire an attorney. In some cases, a revocable living trust is a good option for an estate plan. Property that passes to your heirs through a revocable living trust does not have to go through the probate process.

A living trust is not necessarily a special type of trust. “Living” merely refers to any trust created during the grantor’s life as opposed to a testamentary trust that is created in a will. Living trusts can be revocable, which means that the grantor can dissolve the trust during his or her life.

You can put many different types of assets into a revocable living trust and have them pass to your heirs upon your death. However, you need to make sure that you set up the trust properly. The way the trust is designed can have tax consequences for you and your heirs. Different trust arrangements are better or worse in different circumstances. A trust attorney can help you to determine what the best type of revocable living trust is for both you and your heirs.

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Many people share a common belief that probate should be avoided at all costs, so instead of hiring an attorney to come up with an estate plan they devise their own schemes. For example, most people know that if two people are on a real estate deed as joint tenants, when one person passes away the entire property automatically passes to the surviving joint tenant. As a result of this knowledge, some people will make the mistake of adding their children as joint tenants in their home.

Adding children to to your property as joint tenants might work out in some cases. However, what might happen if your children have debts they cannot pay? You might find yourself involved in costly litigation to keep your children’s creditors from making a claim against your home. This litigation could be a lot more time-consuming and costly than probate. If your children owe money to a government agency, it’s almost guaranteed to be more expensive than probate.

Experienced estate planning attorneys have many methods of ensuring that your property passes to the people you want it to. Sometimes, those methods will include probate as a necessity. However, an attorney can and will plan your estate and draft the appropriate documents in a way that makes the probate process as painless for your heirs as possible. Probate only needs to be scary if you don’t have an experienced estate attorney working for you.

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Parents of children with disabilities lost an important and influential advocate when Nina Eaton passed away on March 30th. An estate planning attorney can only do so much to help protect the interests of your special needs child. People like Eaton take up the slack and help provide a solid legal and cultural framework so that children born with disabilities lead rich and fulfilling lives.

Eaton was an original founder of the United Cerebral Palsy Association, which began here in New York as the Cerebral Palsy Association of New York. Together with other parents of children with cerebral palsy, Eaton used the organization to advocate and obtain the vital social services that their children needed. Eaton continued to be an important advocate for children with cerebral policy throughout her life and served on the Board of Trustees for the United Cerebral Policy Association well into her 90s.

We normally use this space to educate readers about an important aspect of estate planning. It would be remiss to not acknowledge that estate planning to provide for the care of special needs children is what it is today, in part, because of people like Nina Eaton. Children with special needs and their families need more people like Nina Eaton.