Estate Planning

Texas offers its residents several favorable benefits. We do not have an individual income tax, we do not impose an estate or inheritance tax, and we provide extremely generous protection to individuals from creditor claims. To share in this good fortune, you just have to be domiciled within our state.  “Domicile” is a legal term.   It means that you have a true fixed and permanent home and principal establishment in Texas. ...

Ever wonder what will happen to your Facebook account when you die? Here is your answer: TRUFADAA. It stands for Texas Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, which is found in Chapter 2001 of the Texas Estates Code and sets out the scheme for handling digital assets when a person dies or becomes incapacitated. TRUFADAA replaced the original Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Access Act, an unfortunate experiment...

Cue the jokes: in Texas, perpetual care cemeteries are supervised by the Texas Department of Banking. The Department of Banking also supervises prepaid funeral contract sellers and cemetery brokers and (presumably in its spare time) trust companies and state-chartered banks. There are two types of cemeteries in Texas: perpetual care and non-perpetual care. The owners of a perpetual care cemetery have a duty to keep up the place – that...

For many, many years  –  from the stone age through 2011, to be exact  –  attorneys in Texas regularly recommended trusts to their clients as a way to minimize or avoid estate taxes. A lot of clients heeded the siren song, and hundreds, nay, thousands, of trusts were formed. The trust documents were sent home with the clients, who, naturally, put them away in very safe and secret places. So...

Little known laws are the light of a litigator’s life. Example: the law of cemetery plots. The right to be buried in a certain plot is known as “the exclusive right of sepulture.” The right is usually conveyed to the person via a certificate of ownership, although that is not the only way it may be conveyed. A plot may hold contain more than one grave, niche or crypt. A cemetery plot isn’t treated like...