Beyond drafting the highest quality documents, customized to your unique needs, our law firm guides and supports you in the practical matters that make your estate plan work. We offer complete trust funding services to ensure that your assets are properly planned in the event of disability or death. Trust funding is a critical element in successful estate plans and ensures that your estate plan attains its goals. We also offer education and training to ensure that the loved ones you designate know what to do should they need to assist.
Whether you are planning to safeguard assets, reduce estate taxes, avoid probate, provide for a special needs child, or protect a loved one's inheritance from divorce or creditors, it is critically important to manage the mechanics of your estate plan.
Our trust settlement services help your loved ones by easing the process of estate administration when a death occurs. Settlement services ensure that your wishes are carried out according to your estate plan.
Estate Planning
Our philosophy emphasizes the most current estate planning documents and asset protection strategies, completely customized to the unique needs and circumstances of you and your loved ones. Beyond quality legal documents, we are committed to the mechanics that make your plan work. This administrative and educational emphasis helps to ensure that your estate planning goals are achieved.
Our goal is to help our clients design estate plans that allow them to control their property while they are alive and well and to pass along their wealth and wisdom to whom they want, when they want- all in a way that protects assets from future creditors, divorces or judgment claims.
Asset Protection
Asset protection is the process of structuring the ownership of assets in a way that erects barriers which make those assets more difficult for subsequent creditors to reach. This process involves placing a portion of a client’s net worth behind obstacles that impede creditors; the more obstacles, the greater the protection.
Asset protection has been compared to buying insurance on a boat. The best time to insure a boat is on a sunny day, when the skies are clear, the water is calm, and the boat is safely tied to the dock. Once the seas rise, the wind blows and the boat is miles from shore, it is too late to think about insuring the boat.
Similarly, when protecting assets from attacks by lawsuits and creditors, the best time, in fact the only time, to safeguard those assets is before they are threatened. Asset protection becomes difficult, if not impossible, once the assets are under attack.
Moody Law Firm works with clients to develop an asset protection strategy that meets the individual needs of our clients. Our goal is to ensure that a client has the proper level of protection while implementing a strategy that is not unnecessarily complex.
Probate & Trust Settlement
Whenever a person dies while owning property in his or her own name, title to that property must be transferred to a new owner. This process of re-titling assets is known generally as probate. Properly defined, probate covers all property held in an individual name at death if that person had a will that specifies what is to be done with their property. If a person dies intestate (without a will) the transfer process is known as administration. In an intestate administration, property is distributed according to the state’s intestacy statute, laws representing the government’s best guess of what most people would want to have done with their property after they die. Both probate and administration are public proceedings which can be joined by any party purporting to have a claim against the estate.
If a person placed their assets in a Revocable Living Trust (RLT) while they were alive, the transfer process is known as settlement. An RLT is a legal document containing a set of instructions to control what happens to a person’s property when they die. Settlement provides a number of advantages over probate or administration. Because the RLT has personalized instructions for distributing assets, settlement is usually a much smoother, less costly process than probate. Because settlement is a private proceeding, it is much more difficult for potential creditors of the estate to insert themselves into the process. Settlement services are only available in cases where a person dies with a properly funded RLT. All other estates must go through either probate or adminstration.
Our probate and trust settlement services help your loved ones by easing the process of estate administration when a death occurs. Settlement services ensure that your wishes are carried out according to your estate plan and with the minimum amount of difficulty for your loved ones.
Medicaid Planning
The possibility of a catastrophic injury or illness requiring long-term institutional care is one of the largest financial threats facing retired Americans. According to one study, for Americans who reach age 50, the chance of entering a long-term care facility before reaching age 80 is greater than the chance of dying in that same period. The average cost of care in a long-term facility is $150 per day, almost $55,000 per year! A lengthy illness can erode much-needed retirement savings, leaving nothing to provide for spouses or descendants. Changes in Medicaid law have made it increasingly difficult to pay for long-term care while preserving adequate wealth to provide for spouses and heirs. At Moody Law Firm, we work with clients facing catastrophic illnesses or injuries to ensure that they receive the care that they need while preserving as much of their personal wealth as possible.
