People often think of an estate plan as some combination of documents. A lot of words on fancy paper with “sound mind and body” and “heretofore” sprinkled in to ensure that our quota of $5 words is met. While you will probably see some legalese in the documents that your dedicated estate planning attorney prepares for you at WM Law, the real tool is the advice your attorney is providing you. That advice is a product of years of training and experience your attorney has gained specifically for your benefit. The documents are just a tangible and portable application of the advice, the care, and the understanding that your WM Law attorney has prepared for you.

Let’s say you want to leave an inheritance for a loved one. You don’t want to have your estate go through probate. You don’t want your loved one’s creditors to be able to take his inheritance away from him. You don’t really trust your loved one’s spouse. You don’t want your loved one to blow your life savings on a new Camaro and a trip to Paris. A well drafted living trust can help make any or all of those things happen for you. A living trust is created for your benefit during your life. After that period a new trustee administers the property for the benefit of your loved one. Because the new trustee takes over as soon as the prior trustee is incapacitated, there is no need to go through the probate process.

Irrevocable trusts are a great way for you to give gifts that keep on giving! As with the revocable trust, it can be drafted to ensure that the beneficiary’s creditors can’t reach it, so it lasts longer than a simple grant of property might, and it makes sure the property isn’t in your estate for death tax purposes.

When a person passes away either with or without a will, a court order will be required to finalize the affairs of that person and to transfer the property that person owned to the person who will own it now. This process is called probate. The purpose is to make sure that the estate is properly managed, that the parties are treated fairly, and there is something that definitively says what has happened with this property and the estate is closed.

While many of our clients are able to avoid probate entirely, there are occasions where probating an estate is necessary, advantageous, or both. In those cases, WM Law is ready, willing, and able to help you navigate the probate process. Whether WM Law helped you develop your estate plan or not, we will strive to get you the best possible outcome of a probate proceeding and we will strive to get that outcome in the most cost effective way possible.

Dealing with the passing of a loved one is never easy, but being the person who has to deal with the business of tending to the affairs of a loved one makes it that much harder. WM Law wants to help make the process of wrapping up the affairs of your deceased loved one as easy for you as possible.

In cases where your loved one’s estate is worth less than $40,000.00 WM Law will help you wrap up those affairs, and will do it for a low fixed fee. We know that when you are tying up the loose ends left by the passing of someone close to you, you don’t want to have to worry about coming up with thousands of dollars in retainer fees and then wondering how many hours you will be billed for each month.