Avoid Probation & Protect Your Family
There are few things as meaningful as the passing of a father’s company to his son. It is one of the few instances when stories actually accurately portray the range of emotion and significance attributed with anything real. Allow me to give you an anecdotal account of the time that I actually encountered this and how certain realities hindered one young man from inheriting the family business.
Joseph was on his way home from his father’s funeral. Inheritance was certainly not his chief concern as he drove home, parked, and unlocked his front door. In the following days and weeks, even as he mourned, he knew that the estate of his father would have to be attended to, if only to honor the final wishes of his father. Most of Joseph’s father’s estate was divided easily as per the terms of his Living Trust, which allowed his family to receive what they had been left without a time-consuming court procedure. The Living Trust is in essence, the easiest and most efficient means of passing down possessions.
However, Joseph noticed that something was missing from the trust: his father’s business, or by all his rights, Joseph’s business. By some lapse of judgment on either his father’s part or the lawyer he hired to maintain his trust, Joseph had no ownership of the business. He now must spend a great deal of time and money in order to obtain the business through probation in the courts. Consequently, not knowing how to deal with the problem himself, he came to me for help.
I never like to see victims of the probate process. Joseph’s situation, unfortunately, is faced by so many people every day, and the worst part is: It is 100% avoidable.
If I were Joseph, I would have preferred than any inheritance processes be completed as soon as possible, if only so that I would not have to dwell on the fact that my father had just died, and his estate could not be set in order. There is a reason that I practice law in the way that I do. I help people to establish the Living Trusts they need in order to save their family from all the hassle that Joseph had to face. That is, to be involved with the costly probate process.
One of my most prominent values is to help my clients. I have a deep desire to keep people away from hardship, and I have the skill and knowledge necessary to help them. As a result, I made it my profession, not to profit from the difficulty of others, but to help in erasing the difficulty altogether. To this end, I even offer complimentary estate planning reviews to help those who might not even know what hardship could be looming in their families’ futures.
Avoid probation and protect your family.