By Timothy S. Barkley, Sr. November 2017. The man plucked at my elbow in the Post Office the other day.  “You’re that guy!” he exclaimed, “that guy who writes for the Messenger.”  Relieved that he had not mistaken me for some old enemy, I nodded and smiled. “Wait a minute, I know you!” said the lady in Wal-Mart a few weeks later.  “You write about wills for the paper.”    Pleased to be thus recognized, I allowed myself to be finagled into...

By Tim Barkley.  December 2014. “If I don’t have a will, the State will get everything when I die!” “I don’t need a will, because everything is going to my spouse!” “If I have a will, my estate doesn’t go through probate!” “I need a living trust, so I can avoid probate! That lady on TV said so!” The author addresses these and similar misunderstandings on a daily basis. Some are alarmist, some induce heedless complacency; all can lead to bad...

By Tim Barkley. October 2013. The lawyer greeted Susan as she entered the office. She waved a large maroon notebook. “I think we might have found the trust. Is that what this is? It’s about a million pages long. We were going through some boxes in the basement and found this last night.” The lawyer carried the notebook to the conference room and leafed through it while Susan seated herself. “Yep, this is a trust form...

By Tim Barkley. September 2013. Susan sounded uncharacteristically jubilant on the phone: “Big news! Mary was picked up for a DUI and has disappeared! I don’t think she’ll be causing any more trouble.” “That’s a relief,” replied the lawyer. “We’ll have to talk to your mother’s lawyer and see what she says about the guardianship, now that Mary’s out of the picture.” “I...

By Tim Barkley. February 2013. One of the most commonly employed planning tools on today’s estate planner’s workbench is the revocable living trust. Revocable. Living. Trust. Separate ideas rolled into one planning tool that might be right for you. A TRUST is a separate legal entity, like a business. Just like you might set up a corporation and control the corporation as sole shareholder, in the same way you can set up a trust and retain...