Florida Probate Litigation Lawyer Blog

Charitable giving is an American tradition, and Americans give to charitable organizations at high levels. Gifts in the form of donations of cash remain the favorite vehicle for positively impacting charities of personal significance. Increasingly, however, individuals are seeking tax advantageous methods of utilizing asset-rich portfolios in order to achieve philanthropic financial goals. Now more than ever, charitable giving involves the donation of assets other than cash as effective and tax efficient methods for effectuating charitable gifts.
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For many, the purpose of estate planning is to dispose of one’s property upon death in a manner that ensures that one’s loved ones will be taken care of. While some accomplish this by devising their property in a will to their intended beneficiaries, others take advantage of what are often called “will substitutes.” For example, life insurance policies are one type of will substitute. Unlike wills, life insurance policies do not go to policy beneficiaries via probate, which makes insurance policies potentially useful estate planning mechanisms for tax avoidance purposes. Despite this obvious plus, children of the baby boomers-deemed “generation X” in Jeff Reeves’ article, “Survey: Gen X seriously short on life insurance”-have on the whole not been taking advantage of life insurance as an investment and estate planning vehicle. According to the article, a recent survey by New York Life revealed that on average Americans born between 1965 and 1976 require life insurance in an amount nearly $449,000.00 greater than that which they have opted for. Furthermore, almost 20% of “Generation X” does not have any life insurance coverage, a figure that is up from the 5% reported in 2008.
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A will is an important document for many reasons, the primary one being that it disposes of a person’s property without that person being present to ensure that his or her wishes are being fulfilled. This in part explains why creating a will entails a great deal of formal requirements, designed to (a) impart upon the person creating the will the importance of the document and (b) ensure that the document, which exists well after the testator’s death, represents the most accurate representation of the testator’s wishes.
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As the result of modern advances in technology, more and more children are being born through in vitro fertilization. Another reason for this trend is that a greater number of career oriented professional women are choosing to focus on their careers at ages when, historically speaking, most women were focused on having children. Because many such career oriented women still wish to have families later on in life, they commonly will opt to save their eggs when at their most fertile, so they will not be disadvantaged down the road when they do wish to become pregnant, but might be at an age where traditional biological conception is no longer possible. Additionally, in vitro fertilization can provide infertile couples the ability to have children through donated embryos. While in vitro fertilization can be a great benefit to many families, it also can be the cause of many problems. Some of these problems arise within the legal context of inheritance, which in recent years has been complicated by the modern trend of in vitro fertilization.
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The intersection of law and technology has received heightened attention in recent years due to the increasing importance of social media in our daily lives and the resulting implications for our personal privacy and confidential information. This modern interrelation between law and technology is becoming increasingly important in the field of estate planning, particularly in light of the recent increase in the use of assisted reproductive technologies (“ART”), such as the utilization of in vitro fertilization technology to produce children.
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