Legal Question in Wills and Trusts in Indiana

Re: Estate planning

I suggest you consult with a real lawyer and cheerfully pay his or her reasonable fee. I doubt if anyone among us would chance to advise a client without fully understanding the circumstances of your life and estate. If you do not know an attorney you trust, then try calling your county bar association for a referral.

Re: Estate planning

If your children are minors, you will want to think about who you would want to raise them if something happened to both of you. Then you would want to consider whether there is any tangible property that you want to be held by someone to pass along to the children when they reach the age of majority (currently 18 in Indiana). This is the important part of your planning if the children are minors. You also want to determine who ought to be in control of the money portion of your estate they would inherit and in what form it ought to held - trust or outright by a guardian of the child's estate. Planning for death at a later time in life, after the children have reached majority differs in that it is no longer necessary to be concerned about getting them raised and having an appropriate person to do so. After that time it is more customary to think in terms of having a joint estate that will pass to the survivor of you and ultimately to the children at the death of the survivor in the proportions you determine now or later would be appropriate for each child. Although the law specifies that each child inherits equally when there is no will, it also specifies that where there is a suriving spouse, the children share with the spouse if there is no will. When the estate is owned almost entirely as joint tenants with rights of survivorship or as husband and wife, there is generally nothing to divide with the children. If you are concerned about tax implications of death, you should know that at the present time Indiana exempts from inheritance taxation, $100,000 per child and imposes a tax beginning at 1% on the balance inherited by each child. The federal estate tax equivalent is somwhere around $675,000 before any tax is actually payable. However, the feds also include in your estate any life insurance on top of everything else, while the state does not count that in determining what is taxable. Now you are ready to seek counsel of a lawyer for estate planning once you have thought about these basics. Primarily, select the person, family member or friend, who you would want to raise the children if both of you died in a common disaster.