General Practice Blog

Most cross border estate problems are not tax problems. They are reporting problems, and the penalties for getting them wrong are frequently larger than any tax that was owed. Families discover this after a death, when someone finally opens the file. Three filings that matter The FBAR, filed with FinCEN rather than the IRS, is…

You built a life in Texas or Illinois and still own land back home: a house in Nigeria, an apartment in Mexico, farmland in India, a flat in the Philippines. Your will here, you assume, covers all of it. It almost never does, and your family will find that out at the worst possible moment.…

Most people put off estate planning because they do not think they have enough to justify it. Parents of young children have the opposite problem. The asset that matters most is not an asset at all, and the document is not really about money. The nomination and what it is worth Both Texas and Illinois…

The Illinois land trust is one of the few genuinely regional legal instruments left in American practice. Chicago-area owners and investors know it well. Almost nobody outside Illinois has heard of it, which occasionally leaves families with property in two states getting advice from someone who does not know the tool exists. The basic structure…

Living trusts are sold hard and explained poorly. The pitch is usually that a trust avoids probate, which is true, followed by the implication that probate is a catastrophe, which depends entirely on where you live. For a family with property in Texas and Illinois, the honest answer runs in opposite directions. What a revocable…

Land passes down for two or three generations without anyone probating anything. Cousins hold undivided interests nobody has ever counted. Then a tax suit arrives, and a family discovers that the place they have owned since their grandparents bought it can be sold out from under them over an amount they could have paid. This…

There was a policy, probably. There is a bank, but the account is in his name alone, and the bank will not talk to you. Grief is hard enough without an administrative scavenger hunt. Finding what is there Start with the paper trail rather than with the institutions. The last several years of tax returns…

Financial exploitation of an older adult is usually committed by someone the family knows, and often by someone the parent chose and trusted. That is what makes it so hard to confront and so easy to ignore until the money is gone. An agent under a power of attorney is a fiduciary A power of…

You have been noticing it for months and have just now said it out loud. The law draws a bright line through this conversation, and which side of that line your parent is on determines what remains possible. Capacity is not one standard Different documents require different levels of understanding, and a person can have…

For most families the home is the largest asset they own, and long term care is now the largest threat to it. So when a parent enters a facility and the arithmetic starts, the house is what everyone is quietly worried about. That worry is rational. What recovery actually is Every state runs a Medicaid…