If you were suddenly to become so ill that you couldn’t make healthcare decisions for yourself, who would make them on your behalf? This question has taken on a greater urgency than usual during the COVID-19 pandemic, in which people who have no symptoms on one day can be grievously ill less than a week later.
Many people assume that their next of kin, such as a spouse or an adult child, would make important healthcare decisions for them if the need arose. But what if you are in a blended family? Or if a spouse and adult child disagree, who takes priority?
Unfortunately, this is not an uncommon scenario, especially in second or subsequent marriages when the patient’s spouse is not the parent of the patient’s adult children. In that case, the question of who gets to make a decision about a patient’s health can be a thorny one. The consequences may literally be life-and-death; even if not, the dispute can cause a permanent rift in a family.
Any family can have conflicts over healthcare dec… Read More
Families are constantly changing—sometimes through joyful events like marriages, births, and adoptions, and sometimes less happy ones, like a death or dissolution of a marriage. But too often, people plan for the future as if it will only contain happy events. Even when people do make an estate plan, they tend to ignore the very real possibility of a divorce down the road: either theirs, or their child’s.
Of course, unlike death, divorce isn’t inevitable. Even so, failing to take into account that a divorce could happen could have disastrous outcomes for family wealth. Our firm talks about inheritance and divorce in Ohio, and what you can do to protect your assets for the people you want to inherit them.
As you know, in a divorce, the court divides up the couple’s marital property between them. But unless you have actually gotten divorced, you may not have thought much about what “marital property” is. In essence, “marital property” is any property that either spouse acquires during the marriage, with limited exceptions. In Ohio, one of th… Read More
Here’s a riddle, and you may not find the answer funny: when does a beneficiary named in a will not get the assets left to them in a will? The answer is when the asset is payable on death to someone else. Ohio law authorizes individuals to enter into contracts with banks and other financial institutions to make the contents of a financial account payable to a designated beneficiary on the owner’s death. These are called “payable on death” or “POD” accounts if the funds are in a bank account. Brokerage accounts and other assets, like car titles and even real estate, may be “transfer on death” or “TOD.” POD and TOD assets operate similarly, with the same advantages and disadvantages.
At first glance, POD accounts appear to have a number of advantages. For one thing, they bypass probate court. Upon the death of an account holder, the designated beneficiary needs only to present… Read More
The tasks involved in probating an estate can be daunting, especially for those who have never been through it before. We are committed to relieving anxiety around the probate process and to helping Ohioans through an often-challenging time in their lives.
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