Wills and Estates Insights
Analysis and practical guides on wills and estates.
27 articles, checklists, and guides on wills and estates law, written by the attorneys at MC Law. Every piece is general information, not legal advice—for a specific matter, contact the firm.
Wills, Trusts, and Estate Planning Basics
Estate planning is not about death taxes, which affect a very small number of families, and it is not only for the wealthy. It is about who decides for you when you cannot, who receives what you own, how much of it is consumed by process, and whether the people you leave behind spend a year in court. This article explains the core documents and what each one actually does. It covers intestacy and why the state's default plan rarely matches anyone's intent, wills and their formalities, probate and what it costs, and the revocable living trust including the funding step that people skip and that makes the trust useless when they do. It explains the incapacity documents that matter more often than the death documents, the beneficiary designations and titling that override the will entirely, and guardianship nominations for minor children. A second half addresses the federal estate and gift tax framework, the step-up in basis, portability, lifetime gifting, irrevocable trusts and when they make sense, retirement account rules after the SECURE Act, digital assets, and business succession. It closes with a document checklist, a worked example, an FAQ, and related reading.
The Federal Estate and Gift Tax: Exemptions, Portability, and Lifetime Transfer Planning
The federal transfer tax system taxes gratuitous transfers of wealth through three related taxes—gift, estate, and generation-skipping transfer—that share a single lifetime exemption and a common rate. Because the exemption is historically large, the system now reaches very few estates directly, which has shifted planning away from tax avoidance toward basis maximization for most families and toward aggressive lifetime transfers for the few still exposed. The mechanics that matter are the unified credit and its scheduled reduction, portability of a deceased spouse's unused exclusion, the marital and charitable deductions, and the generation-skipping tax that operates as a separate and unforgiving overlay. This article covers how the taxes fit together, the deductions and elections that shape most plans, the principal lifetime techniques and their risks, and the compliance obligations that follow a death.
Estate Planning for Business Owners: A Practical Guide
A business owner's estate plan has to solve three problems at once, and solving one badly can defeat the others. Control must pass to someone who can run the business. The estate must have liquidity to pay taxes and to equalize among heirs, without selling the business to raise it. And the transfer should be structured to minimize transfer tax while preserving the income tax basis step-up where that matters more. This guide works through each: getting a defensible valuation, structuring and funding a buy-sell agreement including what the Supreme Court's decision in Connelly changed about redemption arrangements, the estate tax framework and the deferral provisions available to closely held businesses, the lifetime transfer techniques that actually move value, how to treat children who work in the business and children who do not, and how to align the entity documents with the estate plan so they do not contradict each other.