Estate planning Expert Voices Today

Vote

The cliche "if you didn't vote, you can't complain" isn't completely right. This is America. You can complain about just about anything at any time. But you will have a whole lot more credibility, if you voted. Please do. More…

Planning for Creative Sendoffs

Last week, I read about creative souls submitting plans to The Final Curtain for their own internment.   Most proposals were from artists, generally younger, with  adolescent ideas like Nick who wants ‘Nick is Dead’ in neon to mark his grave. The others dealt with ashes. Tom wants his ashes in his life box of objects, and Mary wants her ashes in an ant farm while Alex wants his in a giant etch-a-sketch. More…

Helping Loved Ones Cope With Your Death

My mother died unexpectedly 10 days ago. As you can imagine, it has been a difficult and heart wrenching time. But that’s not what I want to write about. This is a note of thanks and a suggestion for us all. My mother made this hard reality a bit easier to bare because she planned well and relieved us of several tough decisions and tasks. And she did these things years ago, while healthy, knowing that someday her family would be faced with her loss. Here is what she did: More…

Stories of Cancer Moms

Research has shown that family stories of hardship, difficult times or tragic events have the effect of increasing children’s resisilency.   What’s not apparent to children and what they learn from family stories is that suffering can lead to growth and eventually success.  The benefits of sharing such stories leads to increased empathy, self-confidence and self reliance. Passing on such legacy is especially important to mothers with cancer.    Their greatest fear, even greater than death itself,  is the fear of leaving their children without a mother. More…

The Provenance of My Stuff

Well, it’s almost two weeks since I moved and I’m almost done unpacking.  I even got some Christmas decorations up to the surprise of just about everyone.  Actually, it was the work of a moment since I had four miniature Christmas trees already strung with lights and tiny ornaments packed away in a plastic bag.  That, and some last minute, half-price fresh evergreens for the mantle on which I laid twinkly lights was the sum total of my decorations  But it worked.  What’s Christmas without twinkly lights?   More…

The Hard Part of Life

The hard part of life is also - the best part of life. More…

Taking Legacy Planning to the Next Level

A short time ago, a large European investment bank advised its clients to “have sex, ideally with someone they love, reflect on the good things in life, give their bodies enough sleep and exercise regularly.”  Major news coming from a bank, so the author explained he “thought it was time that I reminded people there was more to life than watching screens every day."   I think MasterCard’s “Priceless” campaign does it better. “There are some things money can’t buy.”    More…

Instead of Living Wills

If you ask people how they want to be treated if they were to have  a serious, life-threatening illness, chances are they would say   “I don’t want to be a vegetable.” or “I don’t want to be a burden.”   Now, I think that time spent in a hospital waiting room waiting to hear whether a loved one will survive a difficult operation is its own kind of hell.  Worse is not knowing what the patient would choose to do.   Worse still is facing end-of-life decisions without guidance and adult children squabbling fiercely over what Mom would want.   It can be a life or death decision that leads to the ultimate family quarrel, one that can split families apart irrevocably. Once controversial, most people today believe that living wills will solve these end-of-life problems, even though many haven’t gotten around to making a living will for themselves. The real problem is living wills don’t work. More…

Your Board of Advisors

Let’s face it, life is often difficult and quite complicated.   No one, not even the most dedicated DIY’er (Do-It-Yourself er) can get along these days without expert advice.    Why else are those classes at Home Depot so crowded? More…

Killer Flu

H5NI, a number you’ll be hearing a lot about, is the particular variant of avian flu that has public health officials around the world extremely worried.  A bird flu that infects humans then mutates so that one sick person can infect many others could rapidly sweep the world in a pandemic causing anywhere from 2 million to 150 million deaths, according to the World Health Organization. We learned yesterday that the 1918 flu epidemic that killed 50 million people and 675,000 Americans was caused by a bird flu.   Scientists reconstructed the 1918 virus in part from a female flu victim who was buried in the Alaskan permafrost and sequenced that genome information to help scientists today develop vaccines and antiviral medications for the current threat.    Today, half of the people infected with bird flu have died.  Laurie Garrett, a senior fellow on global health policy at the Council on Foreign Relations says,  "That makes it the most lethal flu we know of that has ever been on planet Earth afffecting human beings." More…