Fabisch Law OfficesEstate Planning · Elder Law · Probate
Probate, Estate Planning & Elder Law — Rhode Island & Massachusetts
Insights
Most people come to the idea of a will the same way. A parent dies, or a friend gets a diagnosis, or a new baby arrives, and a quiet question moves to the front of the mind: if something happened to me, who would handle things, and who would receive what I leave behind. A … Read more
The question comes up in almost every estate planning conversation. Do I just need a will, or do I need a trust. The honest answer is that it depends, and anyone who gives you a single answer without asking about your family and your assets is selling a product rather than offering advice. This article … Read more
The question comes up in almost every long-term-care conversation, usually phrased the same way. Will Medicaid take my house? It is a fair question, and it deserves a straight answer rather than reassurance. The honest version is this. Rhode Island Medicaid does not seize the home while a recipient is alive in the ordinary case, … Read more
The phone calls usually come at one of two moments. Either a family is sitting with a parent who is still well and trying to think ahead, or someone has just learned that a hospital discharge is heading toward a nursing home and the bills are about to start. The questions are nearly always the … Read more
A Medicaid Asset Protection Trust is one of the more powerful planning tools in elder law, and also one of the most misunderstood. People hear that a trust can protect the family home from a nursing-home spend-down and they want one immediately, often without appreciating what they are giving up to get that protection. The … Read more
Probate has a bad reputation, and some of it is earned. It takes time, it is public, and it costs money that families would rather keep. So it is no surprise that one of the most common questions people bring to an estate planning conversation is some version of “how do I keep my family … Read more
When most people picture an estate, they picture things you can hold or stand in: a house, a car, a bank passbook, a box of papers in a closet. The plan that gets drafted tends to follow that picture. It moves the house, the accounts, and the papers. Then someone dies, and the family discovers … Read more
Almost every family that calls about Medicaid is somewhere on a single timeline. At one end is the family thinking about a healthy parent’s future, years before any care is needed. At the other is the family that just got the call from the hospital, where a discharge to a nursing home is days away … Read more
A Rhode Island couple keeps a place on the Cape. A New York family inherits a grandmother’s house in the Berkshires. A father who retired to Florida never sold the two-family in Worcester. When the owner dies, the family opens probate where the person lived and assumes that takes care of everything. Then a buyer’s … Read more
Most families come to Massachusetts probate carrying two things at once: grief, and a bank that will not move. Someone has died, the will is sitting in a drawer, and the people left behind need a court to say who has authority before anyone can touch an account or sign a deed. The questions arrive … Read more