When you get past the squeamishness of confronting your own death, it can be rewarding to think about how to allocate all of your major financial, physical and sentimentally valuable assets, including your banking and investment accounts, retirement savings, any life insurance policies and real estate holdings, to mitigate the
Renting property to family can get awkward quickly, but things could get even messier for your heirs unless you’ve documented the arrangement. Pick an estate disputes at random from the cases currently being heard in Ontario courts and there’s a good chance you’ll find an argument over the use of
Drafting a will is just the first step towards a successful estate plan. In order for your wishes to actually be carried out after your passing, you need to check in every now and then to make sure that your original instructions still make sense. Typically, I recommend that clients
Testators should know the risks before using joint ownership as an estate planning tool. There are certainly good reasons for owning property jointly with a beneficiary – top among them its effectiveness as a way to transfer assets while avoiding the 1.5 per-cent probate tax otherwise payable on assets in a person’s
Normally when I write about a multi-million-dollar estate, it’s in the context of an ugly fight between the beneficiaries of a wealthy person that has made the news or ended up in court. However, the B.C. Unclaimed Property Society recently made a different kind of news when it announced that
Lawyers need to practice what they preach and implement a succession plan that kicks in when they are no longer willing or able to continue in the profession. Sole and small-firm practitioners have no problem telling their clients to get an estate plan in place to ensure their family and friends
