Review: Trial & Heirs: Famous Fortune Fights! …and what you can learn from celebrity errors
March 25th, 2011 Filed under: Trusts attorney — Estate Planning Author
The Lowest Price we could find is $19.95 $22.78
The highly publicized estate battles of celebrities cast a bright spotlight on the importance of having the proper estate planning. You’ll have a front row seat in the courtroom while Trial & Heirs: Famous Fortune Fights! replays the “tabloid drama” and points out what went wrong in these riveting cases.
Legacy Expert Attorneys Andrew W. Mayoras and Danielle B. Mayoras are your guides – with research and court records in one hand, and juicy celebrity stories in the other. These include Michael Jackson, Ted Kennedy, Princess Di, Anna Nicole Smith, Heath Ledger, Ray Charles, Jimi Hendrix, Frank Sinatra, Martin Luther King Jr., Brooke Astor, Rosa Parks… and many others! This easy-to-follow guide is complete with Tips to Avoid a Family Fight and Ideas to Spark Family Discussion. The tips alone could save you thousands (or more!) in legal fees.
Discover how to steer clear of the same celebrity estate “errors” as you protect yourself and your “heirs.” The book offers practical advice to:
- Protect your family with a proper estate plan
- Start productive family discussions with parents and loved ones
- Protect your rights if you have a loved one who is aging or has passed away and you’re concerned about being treated fairly
- Navigate through difficult and emotional family fights that can result when the proper planning wasn’t done
- Safeguard the true wishes of a mature loved one in case someone attempts to take advantage of them
- Protect yourself and your family when there are questions about the right way to administer an estate or trust
- Ensure that your wishes and the wishes of your loved ones are protected
- Find a good estate planning and/or probate attorney
Review:
It must be human nature for us to not want to face the fact we are all going to die someday. Depending on the survey, huge percentages of Americans die without a will.
Back around the year 2000, I decided to investigate estate planning and make sure I had an optimum estate plan in place. We got our first will as soon as our first child was born….so I had some familiarity with simple wills. I bought about 4 books on estate planning. Most of these books were a tough read because the subject is not exciting, and estate law is an arcane specialty area of the law anyway. The most helpful book I found was The 60-Minute Estate Planner. I found it the best because of the graphical diagrams showing how the money flowed after each marital partner passed away. I sought out an experienced estate planning attorney who only did estate planning. He set up marital bypass trusts for each of us. I then did all the paperwork for transferring assets to the trusts and the lawyer reviewed them for correctness before I executed them. I then re-titled the assets and updated the beneficiary forms to fund the trusts.
I bought this book with the expectation of being entertained by the stories of wealthy people without wills. Since I had previously researched estate planning, and was familiar with executing both wills and bypass trusts….I did not expect to learn much about estate planning from the book.
This book fulfilled my expectation for being entertained. I enjoyed reading the tales of famous people who had no wills. Coming from Central Illinois, farming country, I particularly enjoyed the Canadian farmer story. Seems he left for the field on his tractor and told his wife he would be back by 10 pm. He had an accident on the tractor and his legs were pinned. When he didn’t come home by 10pm, his wife got some neighbors and went to look for him. They found his legs pinned by the tractor and rushed him to the hospital. He died soon after. When the neighbors went out in daylight to retrieve the tractor, they found he had used his pocketknife to scribe something like……I leave it all to my wife…then his initials. The judge ruled his inscription was a valid will…….but each will must be filed in the courthouse. He ordered the inscribed portion of the tractor to be sawn off and brought to the courthouse. It was sawn off and is now in a Canadian museum.
I actually learned a few things about estate planning in this book. I was not aware of `the terror clause” to prevent your heirs from battling over your estate. I also liked the grandfather’s trust where every April after his death, his trust would match the grandchild’s income shown on the grandchild’s tax return. The grandfather wanted to try to instill the value of hard work onto his grandchildren.
I would suggest reading this book as an entertaining introduction to estate planning. Then read The 60-minute Estate Planner and review the graphical explanations of trusts. The AARP Crash Course in Estate Planning is also a helpful book. Then visit an attorney who specializes in only estate planning to set-up your estate plan. If you are going to set up trusts, have the lawyer help you fund the trust including filling out beneficiary forms correctly.
