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Estate planning prepares for the future and provides security for your loved ones.
Estate planning documents are more than just legal paperwork. They express how you wish to care for your loved ones. In crafting your estate plan, you decide who will care for your children in the event of your death. You determine whom to trust with medical decisions if you become sick. You arrange for your loved ones to receive most or all of your assets on your passing, in an estate plan crafted to minimize taxes and legal fees. Whether your assets are valued at less than $10,000 or over $4,000,000, our law firm can tailor an estate plan to meet your distinct needs. Our firm has the experience, integrity, and understanding to guide you through the process. Call us for a free half-hour initial estate planning consultation. Estate Planning Tips From Our Office: Beware of property tax reassessment scams. At least two of our clients have received official-looking letters offering to help change their property tax assessments for a fee. Luckily, they both realized in time that these were not really from a government agency. Now we hope everyone else catches on as quickly as they did. In fact, informal property reassessment services are provided free of charge by local county assessors in California. We do not know of any reason to pay anybody for this service. These property tax scam letters have started turning up in the San Francisco Bay Area after an extended run of similar letters in Southern California. Problems with such letters there have already led to a state Attorney General's Office lawsuit and the creation of a new state consumer protection law, AB 992. One of the recent San Francisco scam letters is from something calling itself "Property Tax Adjusters." It offers, for a potentially refundable fee of $189, to help the owner of a house apply to the assessor's office to obtain a new property tax assessment for a possible resulting tax reduction. The return address is "Property Tax Adjusters, Regional Processing Center, 11856 Balboa Blvd Ste 281, Granada Hills, CA 91344." Commenters at this consumer protection site are reporting the same return address on other scam letters. The California State Attorney General filed suit last May against a Southern California business accused of running a similar scam. The AG's Office press release announcing the lawsuit provides instructions on how to file complaints if a reassessment scam happens to you. [** See update below about contacting the SF DA as well.][***12/15/09 See further update below with new instructions for sending these letters to the AG's office.] It's not clear if the people sending these notices to San Francisco are connected with the Southern California defendants, but one of the defendants named in the AG's office court complaint is alleged to use a "Suite 203" address at the same 11856 Balboa Blvd site in Granada Hills. The San Francisco Assessor-Recorder's Office has posted a helpful question-and-answer list on the proper way to obtain a free informal review of a property tax assessment in San Francisco County. Homeowners in San Francisco will be allowed to request free informal reassessments from January 4, 2010 until March 31, 2010, and the request form will be posted on the Assessor-Recorder's Web site starting January 4. A San Francisco Assessor-Recorder staff member said calls about the scam have been keeping her office busy since last week. She noted a reassessment will not necessarily result in a tax reduction; it might help people who have owned a property five or ten years, but people who have owned their houses for a very long time may be better off not making such a request. The San Francisco office is especially aware of the scam because San Francisco Assessor Phil Ting himself received one of the letters. He told the Bay City News service, "They got my assessed value incorrect, and on top of that they offered me a proposed value that is absolutely not realistic at all." [**Update: It looks like these letters made an earlier appearance in San Francisco in February, prompting a warning from the SF Assessor and Treasurer. They wrote: "Anyone receiving a suspicious solicitation should contact the San Francisco District Attorney's Office, Consumer Mediation Unit, at (415) 551-9595. You may also send in a copy of the notice you receive to the District Attorney’s Office c/o Consumer Mediation Unit at 732 Brannan Street, [***Update: The AG's office would like to receive physical copies of any property tax solicitation letters of this type that people receive. Rather than use the online complaint form, they ask that people print out this form and mail it in to the "Public Inquiry Unit" address on the form, enclosing a copy of the solicitation letter and, if possible, the envelope the letter came in.] Estate Planning Tips From Our Office: You don't have to fear advance care directives. This summer's health care debate took a surreal turn when conservative speakers, using phrases like "death panels," projected their fears of totalitarian government onto a group of ordinary medical documents that include living wills and California's more detailed Advance Health Care Directive. The main (if not only) occasion for their fury was a proposal to create a small Medicare fund that would have paid doctors for the time they spent helping patients to prepare "living wills." The idea was to help people, if they wished, to record their own highly individual decisions in advance about what type of care they wished to receive, or not receive, if they became terminally ill. Nobody was going to force people into these consultations. But somehow, in this summer's debate, a program that would have helped people assume more control over their own treatment became portrayed as its own opposite -- as a pressure campaign to save money by urging patients to accept a speedy death. The proposal has been dropped from the Medicare bill, and the national political focus has moved on, but some damage may have been done to the reputation of an essentially benign type of document. Living wills have existed for many years as ordinary, conventional tools in medical and estate planning. A living will is a useful, safe document so long as it is created by voluntarily and correctly filling out a form document that was drafted with the patient's interests in mind. (Note: the Physician Order for Life-Sustaining Treatment (POLST), a new type of form allowing doctors to withhold specific types of treatment, is worth approaching with caution. We’ll discuss POLSTs in a later article.) Documents such as the California Medical Association's detailed Advance Health Care Directive can relieve family members and medical providers from the uncertainty of guessing when a person who is near death would have wanted to be kept alive. An important purpose of a health directive is to prevent hospital administrators and insurance bureaucrats – or intrusive relatives – from “playing God” with the lives of patients. Documents of this type got more attention nationwide following the drawn-out and highly publicized death of comatose Florida patient Terri Schiavo. Many people decided that beyond a certain point of incapacity, they would not want to be the subjects of dramatic or cumbersome medical interventions. More detail on the actual proposals underlying last summer’s controversy is available in this Washington Post discussion transcript. The discussion clarifies that Sarah Palin, who introduced the notorious "death panels" phrase, may in part have been thinking about a separate group of proposals to review the costs of publicly funded treatment. These other proposals included a call for an advisory board on limiting Medicare costs. Certainly medical cost-cutting pressures raise important moral concerns, whether they're imposed by public agencies or by private insurance companies, but those concerns exist for all patients, whether or not they write living wills. As part of our office’s estate planning services, we help clients to fill out Advance Health Care Directives using the version provided by the California Medical Association. Copies of the CMA form in English or Spanish can be ordered directly from CMA at www.cmanet.org or at 1-800-882-1262. CMA provides an online sample of the document, including its detailed explanatory section. Q&A: California end-of-life instruction documents.
Documents that explain people’s end-of-life wishes have been much in the news, yet little explained. Following is some basic information about end-of-life decision making. What are the kinds of end-of-life instruction documents? A Living Will can express your preferences regarding each of the methods of artificial life support, or you can use this document to reject all artificial life support if you wish to die a natural death. (California law now prefers Advance Health Care Directives for this purpose.) A Durable Power of Attorney for Health Care allows you to name an “agent” to make health care decisions for you in case you are unable to make your own decisions. You can choose a backup agent to act if your first choice is unavailable. An Advance Health Care Directive, in the popular form provided by the California Medical Association, allows you to express your wishes regarding life support and other issues. A Physician Order for Life-Sustaining Treatment (POLST) is a new type of form allowing doctors to withhold specific types of treatment, especially for people who are seriously or terminally ill. We suggest that patients exercise caution in considering whether to sign a POLST. What is the most widely used health care instruction form in California? The California Medical Association (CMA) publishes an Advance Health Care Directive Kit that allows you to: 1) Create a Durable Power of Attorney for Health Care 2) Choose among prepared statements, or write your own statement, regarding which life support methods (if any) shall be used in your care, for how long; and 3) State whether you wish to be an organ or tissue donor. The CMA Advance Health Care Directive Kit includes instructions and explanations. The forms are $6.00 for members of the public. You can order one at www.cmanet.org, or by calling 1-800-882-1262. What are other sources of information about end-of-life decisions? The California Medical Association Web site, at www.cmanet.org, provides information about Advance Health Care Directives. A nonprofit organization called H.E.L.P. provides a detailed Web site at www.help4srs.org with suggestions and questions to help seniors with end of life decisions and funeral planning. Should I Redo My Existing Advance Health Care Directive or Durable Power of Attorney for Health Care? If your form was executed before 1992, then you should have another one executed. Durable Powers of Attorney for Health Care executed before 1992 expire seven years after the date of execution. If you executed a CMA Durable Power of Attorney for Health Care before 2000, be aware that any statement you made about life support will not be considered a mandatory statement. The current CMA forms contain health care directions that your agent(s) must follow if instructed to do so. By contrast, the pre-2000 CMA forms contain life support statements that are merely discretionary guidelines for the agent. You may also want to check whether your current health care directive or estate planning papers include an information release under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) that allows your agent(s) to receive information from your doctors about your medical condition and mental capacity. Do I Need a Lawyer to Help Prepare my Advance Health Care Directive? The CMA’s forms are designed to be used without the assistance of a lawyer. A detailed explanation comes with the Advance Health Care Directive Kit. A lawyer may be able to help you write a more detailed statement in your Directive, to make sure your wishes are stated clearly, to check to see that the form is correctly completed, signed and witnessed, or to explain about privacy laws. Estate tax changes affect couples with modest assets who have older trusts. Recent increases in federal estate tax exemption amounts have changed the best practices in trust drafting for married couples who have assets well below the current limits. Many older existing trusts were drafted with lower exemption amounts in mind. If both spouses are still living, such trusts should be restated to reduce potential burdens on the surviving spouse after the first spouse passes away. As you may know, the federal estate tax exemption amount is the maximum value of total assets a person may own at death before inheritance taxes apply (that is, assuming the person made no large gifts during life). As of 2009, the exemption amount increased to $3.5 million. Current law calls for the exemption amount to become unlimited in 2010 and then fall back to $1 million as of 2011. However, legislation before Congress may stabilize the amount at $3.5 million. Before the early 2000's, typical 'bypass' or 'A-B' trusts used to provide that, upon the first spouse's death, assets were required to be divided into separately taxable sub-trusts. The intention then was to keep each sub-trust below the federal estate tax threshold, which for many years was as low as $600,000. If a trust that still provides for these mandatory divisions is allowed to take effect following the death of a spouse, it can impose unnecessary burdens on the surviving spouse with no corresponding advantages under current tax laws. With the recent changes in tax laws, older trusts should be re-examined and possibly redrafted. For more details, see our "Trusts for Married People" discussion. |
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