Senior Voice -

When people come to see me for the first time, they are usually emotionally prepared to deal with the unpleasant question of what happens to their stuff when they die. I mean, really, nobody...

Two months ago in this column, I wrote about the new Corporate Transparency Act. Don’t worry, you don’t need to dig that issue out from the bottom of the birdcage, I’ll summarize it here....

Some years ago I had a meeting with a woman who had created a trust, using another lawyer, a few years earlier. She had questions about the trust, which I was able to answer, and it turned out that...

I really dislike all of the sensationalism out there. Everywhere you look, it’s teaser, click-bait, outrage-inducing headlines and hotlinks, exaggerating or even outright lying to get you to look....

One of my guilty pleasures is watching the latest celebrity “trial of the month” on Court TV, and I definitely tracked the recent Alex Murdaugh murder trial. If you haven’t been following it, Al...

A long time ago – around the time I was born, actually – there was a young man from Mississippi who had some success as a singer. He bought a nice house in Memphis, married a beautiful actress,...

Taxes can really take a bite out of your estate. You worked hard, you saved some of what you made instead of spending it all, and from what’s left, Uncle Sam might just take nearly 40%. Forty percen...

When I was in college – still a young and callow fellow – the TV show “Dallas” premiered, and I became a fan. A few seasons in, there was a scene that affected my career. If you don’t...

Many years ago, a physicist named Werner Heisenberg formulated a rule called the “Heisenberg uncertainty principle.” No, it has nothing to do with cooking meth. It is a useful principle in...

This issue of the Senior Voice will be coming out at the beginning of the holiday season. For many of us, that means enjoying time with grandchildren. I don’t know who first said that...

Here we go again: another celebrity estate mess. You have probably heard of Anne Heche. Even I knew who she was, and I don’t follow celebrity gossip or go to the movies that often. But even I have s...

I was watching a Korean comedy series recently online, called “Extraordinary Attorney Woo”. It is about a brilliant but significantly autistic woman who becomes a lawyer. If you don’t mind...

I meet a lot of people who try to “do it themselves,” putting together their own wills, trusts or other estate planning documents from some website or kit, or just by copying something a friend...

In a corner of my office is an old Underwood typewriter. It was built sometime around the 1920s, it weighs a ton, and there is no electricity involved in its operation. The keys still work, but if I...

A long time ago, in a land far, far away (well, Juneau is pretty far away) there was a group of legislators who tried to do the right thing. They wanted to update and improve the laws about what...

Here’s a very common question I am asked: “How much can I give my kids while I’m alive?” The correct answer is “How much ya got? You can give it all away to them”. It's true. This is...

Benjamin Franklin famously said that “nothing is certain but death and taxes”. Actually, he wrote it in French, but that’s not my point. As an estate planner, I deal with death all the time. I...

People believe a lot of things that aren’t actually true. Butter doesn’t help a burn. Your hair and fingernails don’t continue to grow after you die. Sarah Palin didn’t say she could see...

When I was a kid, I lived for a while in a town near Brazil. Not the big country down in South America, but the small town of Brazil, Indiana. What was strange about the place was that they...

Today I want to talk about Marx. No, not the guy who wrote the Communist Manifesto. Not the comic with the big eyebrows either. Not even the ‘80’s rocker. I want to talk about a Marx you probably...

If you ain’t no punk Holler “we want prenup! We want prenup!” It’s something that you need to have ‘Cause when she leave your *** She gonna leave with half. - Kanye West This month’s...

Many of our Senior Voice readers will remember Ric Ocasek. He was the lead singer of a band called The Cars which had quite a few hits in the late 70s and early 80s. And if you were paying attention...

Lots of people get living trusts. For many folks, they’re a better way to avoid costs, disputes and delays when they shuffle off this mortal coil, as opposed to just having a will (or nothing at...

I used to do a lot of litigation – trial lawyer work – and I still read the decisions the Alaska Supreme Court sends out each week. There was one this spring which had me shaking my head in...

A few months back, the State of Alaska got hacked pretty badly. Some evildoers broke into their system, and the State had to shut down all their systems for a while, and then bring them back up...