An appellate court in Michigan recently ruled that an unsigned will could be accepted into probate, which is contrary to centuries of estate law precedent. One of the oldest principles of estate law is that to be valid, a will must be signed by the testator. Generally speaking, the testator should have his/her signature notarized as well. Even if the will was an informal one, known as a holographic will, that the testator wrote him or herself, it still needed to be signed. Somewhere on the d...
People are living longer and often saving less. That means that more and more people are staying in the workforce beyond the traditional retirement age of 65. It is a reality to which workers and companies are trying to adjust. Over the last 30 to 40 years, the U.S. has seen two trends that have led people to want to stay in the workforce past the traditional retirement age of 65. The first is that people are living longer and are more capable of continuing to work in their 60s. The second ...
It might seem obvious that most people know how to behave properly at a funeral, but you would be surprised how many people do not! Funerals are a strange thing to have on television comedy shows, but they are something of a staple. Almost every long-running comedy will eventually have a funeral show. The trick for the writers is to come up with something funny, but not offensive.
When wealthy people make large donations of art to museums, they normally do so in the hopes of getting a tax break for their largesse. Regulators worldwide are often critical of these deals, however, as a Canadian case illustrates. In 2012, the famed portrait photographer Annie Leibovitz needed to earn some money quickly since she had recently been in financial trouble. Someone, although sources are uncertain who came up with an idea to help the situation.
As part of the ongoing feud over everything Michael Jackson related, music producer Quincy Jones filed a claim that he suffered from elder financial abuse. The legal battles over who is entitled to what from the proceeds of Michael Jackson's music and estate are never-ending. As part of that dispute, music producer Quincy Jones filed a lawsuit against Sony and MJJ Productions claiming they tricked him out of money that should have been his for producing some of Jackson's albums. Jones alleges...
While Congress is currently debating possible deep cuts in Medicaid, many people are wondering what that might mean for them should they ever need long-term care in a nursing home. Medicaid is the government program that provides health care to poor people. The debate over Medicaid often focuses on how much is being spent on poor children and poor working-age people. Often left out of the debate is that Medicaid also provides services to a great many elderly people. In fact, the majority of ...
Some people believe that the very wealthiest people do not get Social Security. They might, if they otherwise qualify. Whenever a debate comes up about the future of Social Security, there are people who argue from a belief that Social Security is not something very wealthy people are entitled to receive. For some wealthy people, that is true and they do not receive Social Security. Others do, however. It all depends on how they earned their money. If a person worked at least 10 years and ...
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin have found three new possible early indicators that a person might be developing Alzheimer's or another form of cognitive impairment. Scientists still do not know exactly how Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia work. They are not completely sure of the causes of either. They do not know how to diagnose the disease in its earliest possible stages and they do not know how to prevent it. One thing that is known is this: if the disease can be...
The most valuable assets in many estates today are not physical property or financial accounts. They are intellectual property assets. Today, we often take intellectual property rights for granted. We think of them almost as natural rights. It just seems obvious to most people that someone who created something should naturally have ownership of it. This wasn’t always the case. Intellectual property rights are relatively new. For example, copyrights started as nothing more than a way for En...
When most people are dying, they do so quietly. Sometimes people who have not been lucid for years, however, will suddenly become lucid shortly before they pass away. We really do not know much about death. We know that people pass away, but we cannot really comprehend what the process is like to them. From our perspectives, most people just seem to fade away until they stop. One moment they are breathing and the next they are not. For a long time, medical researchers have been interested i...
