Stouffer Legal Blog

If you are a resident of the North Pole and your job is to deliver presents to children, there are a few key things to consider when planning your estate.

Here are five things that you may want to consider hiring a professional for, rather than attempting to do them yourself

A special needs trust is created to prevent a person who received government benefits due to a disability from losing the eligibility to continue receiving those benefits due to owning assets in excess of the qualifying requirements. A D4C Pooled Special Needs Trust allows a nonprofit organization to “pool” the funds from several beneficiaries under one Master Trust Document pre-approved by Social Security and Medicaid.

When a client acts proactively and seeks assistance from a financial advisor and elder law attorney, we refer to that as long-term care planning. This allows the team to review all the assets held by the client and create a strategy to pay for long-term care that minimizes as much as possible the depletion of assets that can be used by a spouse or later inherited by beneficiaries.

Sometimes the estate planning legal practice area looks like a bunch of capital letters jumbled together. HEMS, QTIP, CRAT, and ILIT get thrown around with assumptions that everyone knows what the letters stand for. Sometimes clients get overwhelmed with the alphabet soup.

In Maryland, the statutes lay out certain requirements that must be met to create and execute an estate plan. For someone to execute a will, he or she must be 18 years of age, of sound mind and sign the will in the presence of two witnesses and a notary.

Long-term care planning involves looking at your wealth portfolio and determining how to instruct your family to pay for any long-term care you may need. Long-term care costs in Maryland can be very expensive, often averaging more than $10,000 per month.

Part of planning involves predicting. It can be challenging to predict what your family’s finances will look like at the time you pass away.

While the pandemic has increased the overall estate planning activity, many Maryland residents still do not have a plan in place. The statistics are consistent with other states and the country as a whole shows that only 32% of Americans have a will (Caring.com).

Many clients search online for do-it-yourself estate planning forms or call an estate planning law firm asking for prices for a simple will. They are often convinced that it is a standard form where you simply change out the names and execute it.