Estate Planning
by cesia@wall-arm.ca | Estate Planning
I just got back from ABA Techshow, which is one of the larger conferences on law and technology in North America. Spending three days immersed in technology designed for lawyers got me thinking again about the technology we use for wills. Specifically, a pen and...
by cesia@wall-arm.ca | Estate Planning
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, particularly since a case a couple of months ago about a man who cut out his daughter from inheriting any portion of his estate; evidence suggests that it was because she, a black woman, had a child with a white man, and her...
by cesia@wall-arm.ca | Estate Planning
Janice Specht was appointed as the executor for the estate of her cousin, a woman who lived modestly but was sitting on $12.5 million. Ms. Specht had never acted as an executor before, and so hired Mary Backsman, the lawyer who drafted the will, to assist her with the...
by cesia@wall-arm.ca | Estate Planning
I speak to a lot of people about estate planning, and some of them hire me to draft documents for them. Most people don’t see estate planning as having any urgency, so they put it off, sometimes indefinitely. Then I came across this post from the Wills, Trusts and...
by cesia@wall-arm.ca | Estate Planning
Here’s some more Facebook news: as of February 12, 2015, you can name a legacy contact in Facebook. The feature is currently only available in the US, but will likely be rolled out to other countries over the coming months. Basically, you will be able to name a...
by cesia@wall-arm.ca | Estate Planning
Last fall, Apple and Facebook made news by announcing that they would cover the cost of any female employee who wished to freeze her eggs in order to preserve her fertility for having a biological child later in life. There has been both criticism and applause for the...
by cesia@wall-arm.ca | Estate Planning
This week ends my trilogy on marriage and divorce with the question: what happens to your estate plan when you divorce? Most people would be quite surprised to learn that divorce in Ontario does not automatically revoke a will. Instead, what happens depends on how far...
by cesia@wall-arm.ca | Estate Planning
Last week, I talked about marriage, and how it revokes a will. This week, I’m going to talk about common law relationships. In Canada, generally speaking, there is no difference societally between a couple who is married and one who is living together but not married....
by cesia@wall-arm.ca | Estate Planning
I got married at the end of October last year. Among other things, signing that piece of paper meant that my husband and I no longer had wills; the ones we had signed about a year before that were automatically revoked the moment we were married. This is a point that...
by cesia@wall-arm.ca | Estate Planning, Life insurance
Life insurance is a great estate planning tool. It gives your beneficiaries money, generally tax-free, and often very quickly after death. If the beneficiary is listed properly, it will almost always bypass the estate entirely, which keeps it safe from creditors and...