Linda C. Ashar - Your Massachusetts Wills, Trusts, & Estates Explained Simply: Important Information You Need to Know for Massachusetts Residents

A few years back we lost our beloved pet dog Bear, who was not only our best and dearest friend but also the Vice President of Sunshine here at Atlantic Publishing. He did not receive a salary but worked tirelessly 24 hours a day to please his parents.

Bear was a rescue dog who turned around and showered myself, my wife, Sherri, his grandparents Jean, Bob, and Nancy, and every person and animal he met (well, maybe not rabbits) with friendship and love. He made a lot of people smile every day.

We wanted you to know a portion of the profits of this book will be donated in Bears memory to local animal shelters, parks, conservation organizations, and other individuals and nonprofit organizations in need of assistance.

Douglas and Sherri Brown

PS: We have since adopted two more rescue dogs: first Scout, and the following year, Ginger. They were both mixed golden retrievers who needed a home.

Want to help animals and the world? Here are a dozen easy suggestions you and your family can implement today:

• Adopt and rescue a pet from a local shelter.
• Support local and no-kill animal shelters.
• Plant a tree to honor someone you love.
• Be a developer put up some birdhouses.
• Buy live, potted Christmas trees and replant them.
• Make sure you spend time with your animals each day.
• Save natural resources by recycling and buying recycled products.
• Drink tap water, or filter your own water at home.
• Whenever possible, limit your use of or do not use pesticides.
• If you eat seafood, make sustainable choices.
• Support your local farmers market.
• Get outside. Visit a park, volunteer, walk your dog, or ride your bike.

Five years ago, Atlantic Publishing signed the Green Press Initiative. These guidelines promote environmentally friendly practices, such as using recycled stock and vegetable-based inks, avoiding waste, choosing energy-efficient resources, and promoting a no-pulping policy. We now use 100-percent recycled stock on all our books. The results: in one year, switching to post-consumer recycled stock saved 24 mature trees, 5,000 gallons of water, the equivalent of the total energy used for one home in a year, and the equivalent of the greenhouse gases from one car driven for a year.

DEDICATION

To my family. Linda C. Ashar, attorney at law

INTRODUCTION: Estate Planning: What is It?

Many estate-planning books suggest you begin the process by taking inventory of all the possessions you will leave behind. This does make a certain amount of sense, as disposing of these things according to your wishes is indeed a part of estate planning. The problem is that simply comprising a list means you could end up with an extremely long list, including every single compact disc you own right now, not to mention the entire contents of your junk drawer. You might have some idea of
what matters to you right now, but what about five months or 50 years from now?

Asking difficult questions and understanding your priorities are the two most important parts of estate planning. Whether you need a trust, additional life insurance, or a living will depends on what you want, not what a lawyer or an accountant tells you to do. Making such choices, though, can be difficult. Therefore, the first three chapters in this book are designed help you focus on the process of determining what you want.

Once you have a sense of the elements of estate planning that are important to you, then you have a reason to dig into the details about wills, beneficiaries, taxes, and all that other minutiae related to planning for whom you not the courts or governments want to benefit from your lifetime of hard work.

In this book, we provide a common sense philosophy and approach to estate planning to give you a place to start. The first part of the book outlines a generalized overview of broadly applicable principles. As you will be reminded from time to time, several aspects of estate planning and provisions for your property at death are controlled by the laws of your state. In Chapter 11, we focus on the specific requirements for Massachusetts residents.