Plain-English guides to wills, probate, and the paperwork your family should never have to guess at.
Pick a path through the paperwork.
Three answers that clear up most of the confusion.
Nobody wakes up thinking, “Today’s the day I tackle estate planning.” And yet here you are — which means you’re either slightly morbid, refreshingly responsible, or someone just scared you straight. Either w...
Getting Started · 7 min readHow much does a will cost? For most people, the answer is: way more than it should be. Ask a lawyer and you’ll hear numbers lik...
Getting Started · 10 min readEveryone has heard the words “will” and “trust” in the same breath, usually from a lawyer, a nervous parent, or a TV commercial...
Getting Started · 11 min read88 guides, written for humans.
Choose one for meYou’ve been meaning to make a will for a while now. Something finally pushed you to actually look into it — a new baby, a birthday with a zero at the end, a parent’s estate that...
Wyoming is the least populous state in the country. Fewer than 600,000 people across 97,914 square miles — roughly one person for every square quarter-mile. You’d think in a pla...
In Wisconsin, the cheese is shared equally. That’s practically a state motto — communal, Midwestern, sensible. And if you die without a will in Wisconsin, it turns out your prop...
You’ve lived on that land outside Morgantown your whole life. You know every ridge, every hollow, every stand of timber. What you might not know — what most West Virginians don’...
It’s October in Vermont. The maples are doing their annual performance — forty shades of orange and red that make people drive from three states away just to look at leaves. You...
You have five kids. This is not unusual in Utah — the state has the highest birth rate in the country and one of the largest average household sizes. Five kids, a house in Provo...
South Dakota is the tax haven that nobody talks about at parties — but every major bank’s trust department knows exactly where it is. No state income tax. No estate tax. No inhe...
In South Carolina, sweet tea is non-negotiable. You drink it at every meal, you offer it to guests, you serve it at funerals. There are rules. There is a way things are done. Es...
Rhode Island is the smallest state in the union. You can drive across it in 45 minutes. The whole place is 1,214 square miles. Yet somehow, Rhode Island has managed to create on...
You bought that bungalow in Portland in 2014 for $285,000. At the time, everyone thought you were crazy to spend that much on a starter home. Now it’s worth $620,000, you’ve pai...
The wind comes sweeping down the plain, and honestly, so do the inheritance complications. You die in Oklahoma without a will. Maybe it’s a heart attack on the Turnpike. Maybe i...
Picture this: It’s February in North Dakota. The temperature is -22°F, the wind chill is something that makes weathermen on the coasts openly weep, and you’ve just died without ...
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