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I liked Max Gruenberg. Max was a lawyer, and a long-time legislator. I did battle with him in both venues; as a trial lawyer, when we had cases against each other; and when he was in the State House of Representatives, and I was nominated to sit on a commission (Max grilled me for 45 minutes in committee, to the point that other committee members were asking him to hurry it up and finish, but then when my nomination came to the floor, he spoke in favor of it). Max was a sincere guy. Even though...
You can’t believe everything you read online. You knew that already, right? For instance, I don’t know how many times I have seen a list online, showing all the community property states, and Alaska is included on the list. ALASKA IS NOT A COMMUNITY PROPERTY STATE! Sorry, I didn’t mean to yell. But Alaska is not a community property state. We do have a statute which allows a married couple to opt into community property, by including certain provisions in a living trust or a specific agreement....
One of the biggest problems with DIY estate planning (where you get a kit, or a program, or a form, and “do it yourself”) is that the stuff you don’t understand can ruin everything. But then, this happens even with estate planning you get from a lawyer. Sometimes. Case in point: up until 2011, there was some very complicated language, which was inserted into a lot of living trusts, splitting the trust when the first spouse died. It was a necessity in certain situations, but that language is st...
You can bicker, bicker, bicker You can talk, you can talk You can talk all you wanna But it’s different than it was. I love a good musical, and one of my favorites is The Music Man. And the beginning always makes me think of estate planning. Bear with me. The first number in the show, which is actually named “Rock Island,” after a famous train line, features a bunch of traveling salesmen heading to their next destination. As the train itself beats out the time, they argue about the diffi...
Adult guardianship cases are kind of a big deal. And sometimes, they’re difficult. On one side you have the Respondent. This is typically someone who has some kind of dementia, mental health issue, or medical issue which renders them unable to handle their own affairs. Oftentimes they are in danger of losing such essentials as housing, public benefits, or life savings, if someone doesn’t step in and help out. On the other side you have the Petitioner. This is typically a family member or fri...
When you last signed a will, you might have noticed that after the main part of it, there was a bunch of added legal stuff. This is about that all-important added legal stuff. (Wait, you have signed a will before, right? Right? Please tell me you have. If not, quit reading this and go call a lawyer.) At the end of a properly-drawn will, following the signatures of the testator and the witnesses, there is typically a page or so of additional legalities, and then another set of signatures, followe...
This is a subject which, for a lot of people, is going to touch on some very personal, and perhaps painful, circumstances. Some years back, I was involved in a case involving termination of life support, which went all the way to the Alaska Supreme Court. It was a horrible case for everyone involved. A middle-aged lady had choked on some food, and suffered anoxia (lack of oxygen to the brain). A mere nine days later, the doctors wanted to end all life support, insisting that she was never going...
Last month, I promised that I would cover the estate planning consequences of the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act” in this month’s column. At the time that previous column was due, the final version of the bill had just passed, and I still needed time to figure out what was in it. And there is a lot in it. Most of it doesn’t have anything in particular to do with estate planning, though. And the parts of the bill that do affect estate planning, don’t change a whole lot about what you should do. The m...
I was hoping this month's column would be about the changes to the tax code and how that effects estate planning. No such luck -- the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is still pending in Congress, subject to last-minute negotiations, and my deadline is nonetheless upon me (the Senior Voice editors are brutal taskmasters. The last time I was late with my column, I woke up to find a severed horse's head in my bed). So, let's have a little fun instead. Let's look at somebody who did it his way – and did it r...
Forms can be helpful. And dangerous. Back in the days when I did a lot of trial work, I encouraged the court system to develop forms that people could use for simple matters. I saw a lot of folks who needed some form of relief, but couldn’t afford thousands of dollars to retain an attorney. Forms for simple things like filing a motion in a family law or probate case made a lot of sense. And I still believe in that. However, there is a downside to the use of forms. If you try to use a legal f...
I really wish they hadn’t called it an IRA. Back in 1997, a senator named William Roth pushed through a law which allowed for a different type of retirement account. Up until then, if you wanted to save for retirement in a way that was tax-advantaged, your only option was a traditional IRA, or one of its close cousins like a 401(k) or SEP. There were minor differences, but these IRA-type accounts pretty much worked the same. There was a tax deduction when you put the money in, but you had to p...
Let me tell you a story. I promise I will eventually flounder my way to a relevant point. A few years back, on a cold winter day, I was out walking my dogs. At one point the boy dog suddenly began pulling in one direction, and the girl dog in the other. It caught me off guard, and I happened to be standing right on an icy spot. My feet went out from under me, and with both hands tied to the leashes, I was unable to get a hand down to break my fall. I went down hard. The next day, realizing that...
Remember 1987? If you lived here in Alaska, you might remember that it was the absolute nadir of the recession. Oil prices had dropped, jobs had gone away, houses had been abandoned. Generally speaking, it was not a good time and place to start a career. But there I was, fresh out of law school and returning to my hometown. Growing up and going to college here in Anchorage, this had been an exciting boomtown. In the three years I was gone, it had become more like a ghost town. If you’re an a...
“I’m just gonna leave everything to Bubba,” says the gent across from me. “That's certainly doable,” I tell him. “But what's the reason you’re disinheriting your other kids?” “I’m not really disinheriting them,” he says. “Johnnie has some alcohol problems. Dolly is fine, but if her no-good husband gets his hands on the money, he’ll spend it all. So I’ll just leave it all to Bubba, and he’ll take care of the other kids.” “So... when you say you’re leaving it to him, I take it you mean, he’ll b...
I grew up in the '70s. Back then, young people tended to sow their wild oats fairly indiscriminately. Sometimes, one of those wild oats sprouted. Those of you with grayer hair than mine, or at least with a good historical perspective, might point out that this sort of thing has been going on since... well, probably since the dawn of time. Even the Old Testament is complete with such stories (think Bathsheba). "Les Miserables" is based on such a sad tale. But back then, before the sexual...
I am going to begin this column with more than just a spoiler alert. If you have never read the short story “Flowers for Algernon” by Daniel Keyes, put down this paper immediately. Go buy it, or download it, or whatever, and read the story. You may then continue reading this column. If you fail to follow these instructions, I will have ruined for you one of the true masterpieces of literature. Flowers for Algernon is a story about a mentally handicapped man who is selected for an exp...
You like potato, I like potahto You like tomato, I like tomahto Potato, potahto, tomato, tomahto Let’s call the whole thing off! The point the Gershwin brothers were making, I take it, was that slight differences in semantics shouldn’t make any difference in reality. Okay, maybe it’s more complicated than that, but I didn’t write this column to talk about Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Sometimes, slight wording differences matter tremendously. Take Medicare and Medicaid, for example. They so...
Here’s another question I am asked regularly: how small does an estate have to be before it does not have to go through probate? Back when I was starting out, and in fact for quite a few years after that, the answer was easy. If it was less than $15,000 and there was no real estate, it did not have to go through probate. Anything above that, and it did. That was it, plain and simple. It was easy to figure out, although it was an awfully low amount, and that meant that a lot of cases had to go th...
If you go to the movies very often, you might have heard of an actor named Philip Seymour Hoffman. He was quite a talented character actor, he even won an Oscar for portraying Truman Capote, and he was nominated for a number of other Oscars and Tonys as well. Don’t worry, I’m not about to turn this into a movie review column. My interest in the talented Mr. Hoffman is not that he was a good actor, but that he was a bad estate planner. When Philip Seymour Hoffman died in 2014, he left behind a s...
When I first discovered the estate tax (or if you like, “death tax”), way back in the 1980s, the rate could be as high as 55 percent. That’s right, once you got above a certain level, Uncle Sam was taking more than half of what you saved. Nowadays the rate is down to 40 percent, which is still pretty high, but the estate tax doesn’t kick in until you are around $5.5 million, so it doesn’t affect very many people. There is another tax, though, which can affect even fairly small estates,...
Doing your own estate planning is not a good idea. There are a lot of mistakes people make when they try, and they usually don’t realize it. One example is what I call the “illiquid estate.” If you are an accountant, I apologize because I know you use the word illiquid in a more precise way, but I think you’ll understand my meaning. By an illiquid estate, I mean an estate plan where each major asset is designated to go to somebody in particular, and there is not enough left in the “residuary est...
This month’s column is about the novelist Charles Dickens, and the artist formerly known as Prince. Yes, there is a connection. Bear with me. Dickens, as you may know, wrote a novel called “Bleak House.” It followed the travails of a group of people connected to a chancery suit (what we would call a “probate case” in America) which has dragged on and on for generations, sometimes ruining the heirs who keep expecting it to be resolved at any time. Because of Bleak House, Dickens is credited...
Winston Churchill once said that democracy was a crappy system, until you consider the alternatives (I’m paraphrasing of course). When I hear that, it reminds me of the controversy over powers of attorney (POAs, for short). I mentioned in last month’s column that the legislature recently gave us a new statutory power of attorney. It cleans up a number of problems from the old version. One of the most maddening issues we had before was that you were not supposed to check the boxes for the pow...
All right, I gripe about the legislature as much as the next guy. On the other hand, I am also happy to give credit where credit is due. And this last session, the legislature passed a bill which is really helpful. Actually it passed two bills I like. The smaller one involves revisions to the statutory form power of attorney. It’s nothing dramatic, but there were several oddities in the old format which grated on me. But now, no more will people have to figure out, from the instructions, that i...
We Alaskans pride ourselves on being independent. But despite our “we don’t give a darn how they do it Outside” attitude, most of our state laws are the same as just about everywhere else in the U.S. One reason is that many of those laws are tightly governed by federal law (such as Medicaid, which is based on state statutes, but those statutes have to meet federal requirements if the program is going to be funded). But even beyond that, an awful lot of our statutes are written elsewhere. When...
