Amy's Angle

  Why Putting Your Family Home In A Trust Is A Smart Move—Part 2 by Amy Clemmons Brown, Esq. If you are like many homeowners, your home is likely your family’s most valuable and treasured asset. In light of this, you want to plan wisely to ensure your home will pass to your heirs in the most efficient and safe manner possible when you die or in the event you become incapacitated by illness or injury.  Indeed, proper estate planning is as much a part of responsible homeownership as having homeowners insurance or keeping your home’s roof well maintained. When it comes to including your home in your estate plan, you have a variety of different planning vehicles to choose from, but for a variety of different reasons, putting your home in a trust is often the smartest choice.  In part one , I explained how revocable living trusts and irrevocable trusts work, and we discussed the process of transferring the legal title of your home into a trust to ensure it’s properly funded. H...

One of The Greatest Gifts To Your Family Is The Plan For Incapacity by Amy Clemmons Brown, Esq. When it comes to estate planning, most people automatically think about taking legal steps to ensure the right people inherit their stuff when they die. Although that thought is not wrong, it also leaves out a very important piece of planning for life, and perhaps the most critical part of planning. Planning that’s focused solely on who gets what when you die is ignoring the fact that death isn’t the only thing you must prepare for. Rather, consider that at some point before your eventual death, you could be incapacitated by accident or illness. Like death, each of us is at constant risk of experiencing a devastating accident or disease that renders us incapable of caring for ourselves or our loved ones. But unlike death, which is by definition a final outcome, incapacity comes with an uncertain outcome and timeframe.  Incapacity can be a temporary event from which you eventually recover...

Why Putting Your Family Home In A Trust Is A Smart Move—Part 1 by Amy Clemmons Brown, Esq. If you are like many homeowners, your home is likely your family’s most valuable and treasured asset. In light of this, you want to plan wisely to ensure your home will pass to your heirs in the most efficient and safe manner possible when you die or in the event you become incapacitated by illness or injury.  Indeed, proper estate planning is as much a part of responsible homeownership as having homeowners insurance or keeping your home’s roof well maintained. When it comes to including your home in your estate plan, you have a variety of different planning vehicles to choose from, but for a variety of different reasons, putting your home in a trust is often the smartest choice.  Although you should consult with me as your Personal Family Lawyer® to identify the best estate planning strategies for your particular circumstances, in this two-part series we’ll discuss how trusts work (both...

The Basics On NFTs: The Newest Cryptoverse Craze  by Amy Clemmons Brown, Esq. NFTs, or “non-fungible tokens,” are the latest sensation in the cryptocurrency universe, or as we like to call it the “Cryptoverse.” And if you haven’t heard about NFTs yet, now is a great time to learn because they are likely to be a big part of our collective future.  So what is an NFT? In the most basic terms, an NFT is a cryptographic token that exists on a blockchain and is used to establish proof of ownership of digital artwork, videos, GIFs, collectibles, and other digital assets. While NFTs use the same blockchain technology that underpins cryptocurrency, NFTs themselves are not a traditional currency, though they can operate similarly to currency. Some people call them JPGs because they are literally graphic images, but they represent much more than just a simple JPG file. NFTs have been generating a major buzz in the tech and art sectors for years now, but after Christie’s auction house sol...