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It's shorthand for "you should be consulting a real lawyer about this, instead of taking a layperson's uninformed and unprofessional advice on the Internet, but here's my opinion on it anyway." I am not a lawyer, but I think the amount of corporate shell games and fictitious entities should be proportional to the amount of money at stake in the estate. If grandma has $300k left to her name, and can still fry her own eggs every morning, then a boilerplate last will, durable power of attorney, and medical plan from a strip mall estate planning lawyer is probably enough to keep the wolves and vultures at bay long enough to sound the alarums. If grandma still owns a profitable business in her own name, you're going to need to burn some billable hours from a pressed-suit type, and maybe register some new corporations or LLCs. Most people can get it done with the strip mall lawyer, without trying anything fancy. The HN crowd has more money to protect than most people, so they're going to want the downtown high-rise lawyer. And if that person recommends anything that does not sound incredibly boring, commonplace, and tedious, you probably got the wrong guy, and need to walk to a different firm. But since I am not a lawyer, I'd recommend re-titling everything worth cataloguing to a handful of New Mexico LLCs, as they do not require annual reports or disclosure of the principals, and get EINs for them via a nominee, so they won't show up in the cursory asset searches for your elder. The valuable assets would be divided up into separate legal baskets, so no one can come in and take everything in one swoop. Then you lease the property back to the former owner, from the LLC, with a "peppercorn rent"--essentially a gestural payment that can be easily made, so long as the lessee remains competent. So if anyone ever gets your elder declared incompetent, or if they die, anything worth stealing immediately reverts to a predetermined person's legal control. You have to assume that someone is watching your loved one circle the drain, with the intent of searching their pockets once they stop moving. |