Melanie Clayton
If I Don't Have an Estate, Do I Really Need an ...

You don’t need to live in the Biltmore House, have a vacation home, or have a private art collection big enough to rival MOMA to consider yourself the owner of an estate. In fact, virtually anyone who owns anything has an “estate” in the eyes of the law. Although the term may conjure images of mansions and flashy cars, for the purposes of estate planning law, the term “estate” covers a whole lot more.

If I Don't Have an Estate, Do I Really Need an Estate Plan?
Melanie Clayton
New Year, New Office!

We are pleased to announce the relocation of our law practice to Wall Street in downtown Asheville. 

New Year, New Office!

why do I need a will

“Making an estate plan tells the people who love me that I love them, too”

“Making an estate plan tells the people who love me that I love them, too”

We recently met with someone who shared a bit about a difficult experience handling the estate of a loved one who had no estate plan in place. 

This conversation reiterated the importance of having a plan in place – even if the estate isn’t so large that it will need a trust or other complex planning. Consider all of the details that your loved ones will face if you haven’t planned – such as accessing your house and caring for your pets, trying to work with doctors to determine who can make health care decisions on your behalf, weighing the heavy decisions about what health care decisions you would even want, trying to guess whether you would want to be buried or cremated, and then working with the court system to try to determine how your assets will be distributed under the laws of intestacy.

Don’t have a will? Think again… NC has prepared one for you!

Don’t have a will? Think again… NC has prepared one for you!

The American Bar Association has reported that more than 55% of Americans will die without a will or estate plan. This is just one of many studies that indicate that a huge number of Americans, especially young Americans, don’t have a will in place. 

We get it. We like to consider ourselves fairly young and like to at least hope that we still maintain a fair share of our youthful vigor! Like many of our friends, we are new parents and don’t have a complicated estate – and before we got into estate planning work we also mistakenly believed that since we didn’t have many assets, we didn’t need a will.