This comes up frequently: A parent has someone living with them, usually a child, maybe a significant other. When the parent dies, usually all the kids inherit the house, but they want to permit the sibling or significant other continue to live there. Is this...

Many people believe that having a valid will allows their estate to avoid probate. This is not the case. In fact, the probate process focuses on authenticating a decedent’s will (if there is one) and approving the named “personal representative” so that he or she can settle debts and distribute assets to...

Lately I’ve been seeing clients who have spread their accounts over many different banks. My sense is that people do this over time, chasing good interest rates, and not exactly meaning to have so many banks in the mix. Maxing out interest rates is, of course, an excellent goal...

If a loved one just died, there are many steps to attend to; one very important task is to determine if their estate exceeds $2 million, and if so, you need to proceed carefully. To figure out if an estate is over $2 million, you need to look at...

This is an uncomfortable but frequent scenario: Someone dies, and there are simply not enough assets in the estate to pay all the creditors, never mind distribute anything to the heirs. There are clear laws covering this situation.  Bills of insufficient estates are paid in this order:

This is a very common scenario: Someone dies, no one can get into their bank accounts, and yet there are bills to be paid. That includes home utilities, real estate taxes, medical bills, the probate attorney’s retainer, and more. Usually, there is someone in the family who will front...

Yes, you can. And yes, being an executor—now called a personal representative—is definitely a lot of work. If you’ve hired an attorney, she will handle all the court documents, but there is still plenty of non-legal work for the personal representative to do. Various tasks that a personal representative...

Yes! In Massachusetts, we have three types of probates: voluntary, informal, and formal. If someone dies with probate assets of $25,000 or less, plus a car, then you only need to bring a “voluntary” probate. A voluntary is very easy—you can do this yourself, with no lawyer involvement. You...

There are so many tasks to handle when someone dies: closing bank accounts, sorting personal belongings, selling a home… just to name a few. While it helps to know that your funeral director will notify Social Security and Medicare about the death (one less thing to worry about), what else needs to...