Estate planning is an essential but complex process, encompassing various financial, legal, and personal decisions. Organizing records and information properly can make this process smoother and more efficient. This article offers tips and links to helpful checklists to prepare for estate planning.

When you need Medicaid to cover your or a loved one’s nursing home bills in Indiana, you’ll have to qualify for benefits. The process of planning and qualifying for benefits might involve the creation of trusts. Some trusts can protect your assets, while others won’t. Some trusts are acceptable to Medicaid, while others aren’t. Hawkins […]

Hawkins Elder Law provides you this overview of issues you might face with family members as it relates to your estate plan.

Hawkins Elder Law provides an overview of SECURE Act’s possible impact on your beneficiaries and what you could do if you need to make a change to your estate plan in light of the new law.

You might have figured out by now that you need an estate plan, which consists of things like a will, trust, powers of attorney and healthcare directives. The people who you appoint in these documents are fiduciaries – which are basically people who make important decisions on your behalf and who are responsible for acting […]

[See our Disclaimers page about relying on this website’s contents.] Trusts are tools that estate planning lawyers use to solve or avoid money management and property management problems for clients. Protective trusts protect assets from problems plaguing the trusts’ beneficiaries. Protective trusts are increasingly common as lawyers and clients focus on solving problems that do not necessarily […]

Indiana is on the front line of a legal services technological revolution. LegalZoom is pushing a bill to allow electronic signatures of wills, trusts, powers of attorney, and other estate planning documents, while the Indiana Secretary of State driving an electronic notarization bill. Indiana State Bar Association members are working to fix serious defects in […]

[See our Disclaimers page about relying on this website’s contents.] If a person has made a will, a power of attorney, an advance health care directive, or a trust, the person may think that those documents create a dependable estate plan. Unfortunately, many people do not realize that an estate plan includes every kind of […]

[See our Disclaimers page about relying on this website’s contents.] God told the Israelites in the 25th chapter of the biblical book of Leviticus that in every 50th year, a family would regain ownership of land that the family’s ancestors had sold during the past 50 years. The Mosaic Law ensured the blessings of property […]

[See our Disclaimers page about relying on this website’s contents.] We have written more than once in our blog about the need for people to update their estate plans regularly. We get questions from people sometimes about whether the law really changes enough to justify estate plan updates. This week, we answer that question with […]