April 16 is National Healthcare Decisions Day, so we want to emphasize the importance of advance healthcare planning. This is a difficult conversation—no one really looks forward to sitting down with his/her loved ones and talking about end-of-life planning. Instead, people tend to ignore it and keep it buried at...
Creating and funding your Living Trust doesn’t necessarily stop there. A Trust should be updated with important life events—a birth or death in the family; changes to relationships, including divorce; or acquisition of property or other assets that could affect the inheritance of your loved ones. Occasionally, there are also...
A recently remarried client came in to our Walnut Creek office to name his new wife and daughter as beneficiaries for some of the assets he held in an individual Trust. The couple held the Walnut Creek home in which they lived as joint tenants, but he had other assets,...
Many of our business formation clients are like “Joan”, who came in to our Oakland office to talk to us about incorporating her bookkeeping business. Joan was in her late 50s and had had a good job in the accounting department of a large corporation for more than 20 years....
We get a lot of questions from our clients about whether they really need a Living Trust or whether a Will, a simpler legal document, is enough. Trusts are an increasingly popular estate-planning tool for a number of reasons. Trusts are private while a Will is a public document, available to...
A recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle highlighted the Bay Area transgender community’s anxiety about identification issues under the new Trump administration. If you’re not trans, it’s not a big deal Routine procedures that the rest of us never think about can become crises for many trans people. “People take their...
This is the time of year when we wake up to a huge dose of reality. The holidays are over, spring is months away, and it seems there’s nothing to look forward to but diets, bills and taxes. New Year’s resolutions: making promises to ourselves Yet a New Year represents new opportunities,...
A recent article in the Mercury News focused on one of the topics that frequently surfaces around our offices. We call it Aging Parent Syndrome--what to do with aging parents who insist on staying in the family home—even though it’s become a burden and they can no longer care for...
Tom Clancy died in August of heart failure. Just 66, he left behind a huge body of work, and most of us remember him for his books and the movies they spawned, including The Hunt for Red October and Patriot Games. He left behind a family, a fortune and an...
Susan Lenser joined California Document Preparers’ Walnut Creek team in the fall of 2016. She grew up in Orinda and graduated from the University of Southern California with a degree in Broadcast Journalism. Her first job out of college was that of TV news reporter for NBC in Idaho Falls,...
Clients who prepare their Living Trusts identify their assets and how they will be distributed among their heirs when they die. Assets include the obvious things such as real property, brokerage accounts, life insurance policies and other financial resources, but they also include other high-ticket items such as cars, jewelry,...
With our diverse Bay Area population, it’s not unusual that couples get married, then one spouse decides to return to his/her country of origin or move to another country altogether. Divorce can be part of this life change. Our family law team at California Document Preparers finds that these cases surface...
