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Your Legal Companion for Estate Planning
If you’re like a lot of people, you have a nagging feeling that you need to make a will—but you haven’t gotten around to it because it sounds hard or expensive or just unpleasant. (Or maybe you picked up this software because you are the rare individual who loves to plan and get organized. We encourage
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When You Need More Than a Will
If you have little to leave your survivors you probably don’t need to do any planning beyond making a basic will, powers of attorney, and health care directives (all of which you can make with WillMaker). On the other hand, you may want to take another look at your situation and possibly do some additional
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You may have heard or read that you ought to avoid probate—and that if you don’t take steps to do so, your survivors will surely waste a lot of time and money after your death. This section will help you understand what probate is and why you may want to steer your estate away from it. What Is Probate?
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Estate taxes are imposed after your death, on property you leave at your death. Because everyone is entitled to a very large estate tax exemption, only a small number of estates end up owing it. The Federal Estate Tax The vast majority of Americans do not need to worry about federal estate tax, because
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Most people are content to leave their property to their survivors outright, without trying to control what they do with it. However, there are times, especially for people with very large estates, when it can make sense to impose controls on what people can do with property you leave them. We discuss
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Living Trusts to Avoid Probate
If you’ve heard something about living trusts but wonder exactly what they are and how they work, this section will give you a quick lesson. First of all, what’s a trust? It’s an arrangement under which one person, called the trustee, owns property on behalf of someone else, called the beneficiary.