Heirs & Beneficiaries

There has been a lot of debate in recent years about the federal estate tax, but in fact that tax applies to relatively few estates. Earlier this year, Congress set the level at which estate taxes kick in at $5,250,000. Next year, that number is set to rise to...

Many Minnesota residents set up their estate plans to try to keep a particular piece of real estate or a business in the family. To achieve this goal, they may set up trusts, conditions in a will or other instruments to direct the behavior of their heirs and...

Minnesota residents may have been following the recent reports of the poor health of the famous former South African President Nelson Mandela. As of this writing, Mandela, 94, was hospitalized with a lung infection. As he lay in a hospital bed, some of his family...

There has been a lot of hand-wringing in the media in recent years about what will become of the millennials, the generation of Americans now coming into their early twenties. Magazines, television newscasters and websites all want to know if these social media...

Minnesota families sometimes set up trust funds to help their children or grandchildren with their financial needs after they're gone. These can be a great way to keep a sense of family legacy together through generations. However, the work involved doesn't end once...

Many of Minnesota's elderly residents have been targeted by unscrupulous individuals who cheat them out of their money through identity theft and other scams. In some cases, it's not just a common thief but an investment banker or other supposed professional who...

The author J.R.R. Tolkien was famous for writing "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings," epic fantasy stories about a major battle over who has the rights to old treasures like a gold ring and a broken sword. But the success of Tolkien's novels and the movies based...

This blog has reported in the past about the apparent rise in financial exploitation of vulnerable adults in Minnesota by unscrupulous businesses. A recent case involving a Minneapolis coin dealer shows how brazen some of these businesses can be.The coin dealer...

Despite some indications of increasing public awareness, officials from one Minnesota county say that the number of cases they see involving financial exploitation of vulnerable adults continues to rise. The observation of Olmsted county social services workers seems...

As Twin Cities readers may know, the executor of a probate estate typically has broad latitude to manage estate assets in furtherance of the testator's wishes. Sometimes, however, those in charge of estate administration forget that an executor owes a fiduciary duty...