Death Is No Excuse: Planning for Death, Disability, Divorce and Other Disasters

Description

What do Abraham Lincoln, Pablo Picasso, Aretha Franklin and Howard Hughes all have in common? They died without wills, left messy estates and tormented their surviving families who had to lawyer up and fight through the resulting nightmares for years. Whether the reasons for this are death denial, penny-pinching or just too busy to be bothered, the majority of Americans will die in exactly the same predicament-no wills, no planning and nobody lined up to help their surviving families get what's coming to them. "Death Is No Excuse" is an insightful roadmap through the legal potholes of unplanned death and disability, offered by a veteran attorney who's handled the worst of these cases for over forty years. It's a plain-spoken, surprisingly entertaining guide to everything you need to know about planning for death or disability, as well as other calamities that can occur along the way, be they divorce, avoidable tax burdens or getting ripped off as you toddle into old age. Told in twenty-three brisk chapters, each punctuated with a case history of life gone off the rails when people ignore the insights this book offers, "Death Is No Excuse" tells you how to avoid the pitfalls of un-planned death and disability.

David Baker is a probate attorney, licensed in New York and Illinois. He's the senior member of the Country's largest group of Estate and Trust lawyers, at one of the America's biggest law firms, where he's worked for forty-two years. There, he started and now heads the country's largest practice group that focuses on contested estate, trust and guardianship cases. He also started and then ran the firm's Pro Bono program for many years.