Boston Estate Planning and Probate Lawyer & Attorney : Gosselin & Associates Law Firm : Serving Boston, Winchester, Hingham, Wellesley, Manchester

Where is that owner's manual? Is there a warranty on this thing? How do you get it to stop making that noise? Is it supposed to smell like that? Where are the handles? These and other questions come with the arrival of the first new baby in most homes. A combination of panic and "we've gone and done it now" takes over most new parents. Since this is a legal blog, I won't go into the intricacies of diapers, burping techniques or guaranteed sleep inducing maneuvers (for both baby and parents) - although with three sons I am a lesser expert in these things.

Where does the law stick its ubiquitous head into the new family? First, the parenting unit needs to look at itself and determine how they are aligned to each other. In the "old" days, it was just marriage and the child was the direct result (or at least that's what they told everyone) of the marriage. Simple. Now the mother and father may have never met in the biblical sense. Unless a parent has legally given up their rights in the child (through assenting to adoption or through donor agreements for non-gestational parents) then the biological parent has an interest in that child the day that it is born.  My advice is to be crystal clear from the moment of conception (or before would be ideal) as to who's on first. With modern science's simple tools for determining paternity I would also suggest honesty is a good policy, not just hope that the kid will not have your next door neighbor's tell-tale red hair.

Next, the baby needs a name. Not to burst anyone's PC bubble I think that for legal purposes only a simple Anglo-centric first, middle, last name works best on a birth certificate. Practically speaking you can call your baby (and yourselves) anything you please under Massachusetts law so long as it is not intended to defraud others. So, Moonbeam Smith-Jones-Simmons-Wilson, is just fine. Legally? Mary Ann Smith will suit that child far better in the practical bureaucracy that is the American legal system. Trust me. Your child will thank you for it later. And it will save them from having to go get their name changed. Hyphenated names were cool in the 1980's, but now that those hyphenated people are marrying each other we have quite-a-hyphenated-mess-in-the-legal-world.

We have a parental unit. We have a named rug rat. Let the social security administration know. Most hospitals will provide information to you immediately at birth. If it's a home birth, then contact your local social security office or www.ssa.gov. Tell your health insurance company about the newbie as soon as possible too. Do not assume that just because you paid for a live birth that they are smart or organized enough to add junior to their mega computer. You could find this out the hard way if the babe needs some medical procedures done in the early months. Ask for a couple extra birth certificates; put them in more than one safe place, they always come in handy. Open a bank account in the name of the child within 30 days of birth. Seriously, go to the bank (send the father, he will need something to do), and open an account, even with $10. This will at least serve as a spectre of your lack of adequate savings for the spawn's trip to Harvard in 18 years. More practically, it lets you tell family that there is an account set up and gives you a place to start seeding a little bit of an account. Do it right now.

Another project for Dad (while Mom is doing all the hard work of recovering from child birth) is to get some life insurance. In Massachusetts, I can strongly recommend families to look at Savings Bank Life Insurance for quality, affordable TERM life insurance. I suggest getting this insurance from a reputable local savings bank. My favorite local bank is Cambridge Savings Bank (www.cambridgesavings.com). Snoopy's MetLife, John Hancock, Northwestern Mutual, Mass Mutual, Jefferson Pilot, Pacific, New York Life, and Guardian are all perfectly good companies. Your best bet is to get 20 year term life insurance for roughly 10 (yes, TEN) times your annual household income pre-baby. So, if you had a combined $150,000 household income before the baby, then you should have a $1.5MM policy on the primary wage earner and half as much ($750,000) on the stay at home parent. If both parents are working then I would suggest $1MM on each account for a changed lifestyle if one was to die. This term policy that you will own individually (or in a trust if you get fancy with planning) should be in addition to whatever life insurance that you have at work. Buy even more life insurance if you plan on having more children. I would suggest $500,000 per child (wage earner and $250,000 per child for caregiver) after you meet the ten times rule.

Look at your disability coverage at work. If it would not be enough for your family to survive if either parent were disabled then get some of your own too. Unum or Northwestern Mutual are the biggest and best players in this business. It is four times more likely that you will need disability insurance before you are 65 than you will need life insurance. Four times.

And get a will. Now. Don't wait. Get one right now.

Wills need not be expensive, use some of Juniors "college" money or christening/bris money if you get some - it's a good investment. Getting a will first means that you will consult with a competent estate planning lawyer. The lawyer should be able to give you all sorts of valuable information about life insurance, disability insurance, the use of trusts in estate planning, health care proxies, powers of attorney and if they have some real life experience they might give you some wise words to help you get on your feet. Estate planning lawyers, at least the ones I know in Massachusetts are lawyers with integrity that care about their estate planning clients.

Your will will include a provision for the guardianship of your minor child (that's the baby). This is the person, other than the legal or biological parents that would take custody of your child in the event of your death(s). Long discussions ending in tears have been known to happen on this subject more often ending in complete indecision than useful results.

My legal advice? Decide this within 30 days of the news that a baby is coming. Yes, 9 months ahead of the blessed event. You can't really make a will to that effect yet, but you can let the concept of these people assuming a parental role for your child sink in. In my legal experience, it is far better to name someone that you think could do an adequate job than to name no one or worse yet not have any will at all. While you are talking to the estate planning lawyer make sure you discuss how a trust might be useful for you. You should also get a simple; form oriented powers of attorney and health care proxies. With a baby in the house, your responsibilities extend beyond caring for the dog that you've been practicing parenthood on for the past three years. You're in the big leagues now. And there is no emergency exit.

The law will follow that baby throughout life. Just in the first year you'll have medical privacy forms, waivers for liability at day care, employment issues for outside caregivers, emergency care agreements (standby guardianships), 529 plan contracts, etc. Embrace the law and protect your baby with proper planning and good advice along the way. It is not expensive and estate planning lawyers are among the most approachable of all lawyers in Massachusetts.

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The 100 year old man was a child during the world's first Great War. He came of age in the roaring twenties. He raised children in the Great Depression, only to watch his sons go off to World War II. He was a company man in the 1950's and his retirement was a gold watch - about the same time as the first man walked on the moon.

He saw presidents die in office, Americans die in far off lands and he went to the funerals of all his close friends and family. The 100 year old man loved the large screen TV of today with all the channels (including that racy HBO with its wonderful foul language and "brief nudity"). He equally loved the choices of food, reading materials and flourish in the voices of the Caribbean women who cared for him.

After living more than 36,500 days, the 100 year old man is not sure what to do tomorrow. The problem with tomorrow is it is a truly unknown time and place, now that he's reached the century mark. Today. He has this time, this hour, and this minute. But tomorrow?

Some days he hoped that there would be no tomorrow - that this night he would pass back into the arms of his beloved wife. Other days he hoped to see the Red Sox battle the Bronx Bombers or to find out who won American Idol. He never worried much about tomorrow over the past 100 years, but now, tomorrow was on his mind.

So he called me to his small encampment at the end of the hall at a local nursing home and asked me to make out his will. His first will ever. It was his first plan for tomorrow's "what if?" Two weeks to the day his will was witnessed and signed, the 100 year old man indeed passed in his sleep.

His wishes were recorded in his will and trust as a map for his family's tomorrows. All is well. A life well lived.

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The death of emergency Medicaid planning is official. Let us mourn the techniques of the estate planning and elder law bar that allowed elders to qualify for Medicaid benefits despite having significant assets. Due to the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 (passed in 2006) most planning opportunities now involve five year plans and more complex trust instruments. While we are still working on these more complex trusts, including irrevocable trusts, intentionally defective grantor trusts and the like; the demand for our services at the time of Medicaid application has diminished markedly. Despite the law change in Massachusetts (and Federal law), there are still steps we can take for asset protection for elders at the time of application including promissory notes, certain annuities and special needs trusts for certain family members - Medicaid planning is not entirely hopeless, but the best opportunities for elder law attorneys have been signed away by the governments lawyers and Congress. So, what is a lawyer to do?

We are not the type to passively sit by as other lawyers eat our lunch. We have been working diligently for the past several months re-tooling the asset protection aspects of our law firm to be more directly focused on the asset protection needs of high and ultra high net worth individuals who are concerned with protecting assets from all types of judgment creditors. This planning involves the use of trusts, corporate entities and legal jurisdictions where the laws favor the protection of assets (in exchange for bringing new cash to places perhaps not normally thought of as centers of the legal or financial world - like Nevada and Alaska).

In the coming weeks I will be participating in significant training and axe sharpening programs to help make sure that our law firm is on the cutting edge of asset protection, not only in the US but also in cooperation with certain off-shore legal jurisdictions where certain planning can be beneficial for particular clients. I leave shortly for a conference in Las Vegas where the Nevada trust industry will woo my estate planning asset protection attention. In a nutshell, asset protection involves transferring legal ownership of assets to another person, in most cases this person is a trustee and under the various state laws (such as Nevada asset protection law) at least of these trustees must be a Nevada trust company. By so transferring the legal ownership, as well as structuring the language and documentation of the trust so that it conforms with state law, you can achieve protection from certain types of creditors over time (in Nevada you can protect assets in as little as two years), including judgment creditors and even spouses in a divorce.

Our law firm works cooperatively with Nevada legal counsel to make sure that all asset protection documents conform to Nevada legal requirements as these are not Massachusetts documents. We will be revisiting this topic in much greater detail in the coming months as our law firm will be working diligently to bring our clients up to speed on this exciting estate planning opportunity. The main advantage of Nevada asset protection and other state and countries is the use of charging orders (how creditors are paid in the event of a claim) and certain tax benefits. Not only is this legal, but it is a prudent use of client's resources as it is one of the few ways that we can preserve estate tax planning opportunities while locking in the protection of assets.

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There's been a lot of buzz lately about the estate tax limits being raised by this Congress to lofty new levels. Once they raise estate tax exemption limits (estate taxes are taxes paid as part of the probate and non-probate administration processes to both Federal and Massachusetts tax authorities, currently estate taxes kick in at $2,000,000 for Federal purposes, Massachusetts law lowers this limit to collect Massachusetts a few more dollars), estate planning will become less of an exercise in tax avoidance and more targeted to special needs planning, trusts for various special purposes (like dynasty trusts, spendthrift trusts, asset protection, elder law and Medicaid planning, charitable trusts, really whatever estate planning lawyers can think up), and just simple will planning.

So what's going to be fun about that? Our legal clients will no longer be the near affluent seeking to minimize their estate taxes, but either we will have more of the super rich seeking lawyers who can minimize their estate taxes and help them avoid probate or we will have families with unique estate planning opportunities. An article that caught my eye talks about a unique way to dispose of your corpse by helping your alma mater raise a few new dollars. Colleges are now pushing for niches for cremains or full blown cemeteries on their properties. I wonder if the school's cheer leading squad, marching band and mascot can be hired to come to your funeral? Is your final resting place determined by your grade point average? If so, some students may find themselves near the campus laundry instead of on a nice bluff overlooking the quad.

Note to Middlebury College (my alma mater): you are already included in my estate planning; I send you a check or two every year and I volunteer a 100 or so hours a year interviewing new prospects between trying to be a lawyer in Massachusetts - so, you can't have my body too. Once my probate administration is over down at the Middlesex Probate Court, I want my family to rest comfortably knowing that all my debts have been paid and they can file my final probate account in peace. Thanks, but no thanks, I'm not paying any more tuition bills. **************LOS ANGELES -- The rooms in this college dorm have no electricity, no running water, and ceilings that are just 11 inches high. But the residents don't mind. They're dead. Draped in sky-blue marble, the honeycombed structure -- which is tucked behind a set of spooky glowing stones at Chapman University in Orange, Calif. -- is designed to house the cremated ashes of alumni, faculty, and pets.

The mini-cemetery is part of a small but growing trend on college campuses. This summer, Notre Dame will unveil a pair of limestone and brick mausoleums laced with full-body crypts selling for as much as $11,000. And the Citadel military college in South Carolina is adding 400 urn niches to a carillon tower that holds one of the Western Hemisphere's biggest collections of Dutch bells. The University of Southern California is also studying the idea of campus tombs for a proposed multifaith chapel.

Think of it as continuing ed for the dead -- or the ultimate college reunion. In today's mobile society, some people feel more connected to their alma mater than to their hometown, said cemetery consultant Mel Malkoff, who oversees Chapman's columbarium and is working on similar projects with other schools. "People look back on their college years and say, `Those were the best days of my life,' " Malkoff said. "Why not spend eternity there?" Hoping to cash in on such sentiments, some universities don't stop with enrollment space. They also offer custom urns -- or coffins blessed by monks. As odd as such practices might sound, they're rooted in the past. College graveyards were once fairly common, said historian David Sloane of USC, author of "The Last Great Necessity: Cemeteries in American History." In the early 1800s, before embalming became widespread, it was often impractical to ship home the body of a deceased student or professor. Iowa State University's 131-year-old dead zone holds about 800 corpses, mostly faculty but also two students, a night watchman, and his dog. Notre Dame's sprawling burial ground debuted in 1843, one year after the school was founded, along with a mortuary that helped subsidize tuition costs.

By the late 20th century, many longtime college cemeteries were languishing. The University of Virginia's 1828 graveyard ran out of room in the early 1960s, said Dr. Dearing Johns, a cardiology professor who heads the school's cemetery committee. School officials decided against expanding it -- until an alum who wanted to be buried on campus suggested a columbarium wall and paid for the construction with three friends. It's a great way to generate money," said columbarium chief Andrea Patenaude of the University of Richmond, which recently transformed a sliver of campus into a million-dollar serpentine wall carved with 2,900 niches priced at $3,000 each. A spider logo, depicting the school's mascot, climbs the bamboo gate leading to the wall. Duke University is charging $25,000 a pop to bury ashes in its new 2-acre memorial garden. Part of the motivation for Duke's program was that people had begun scattering ashes there on the sly. The profits will help finance the school's vast public gardens.

Chapman's dorm for the dead, with prices ranging from $2,500 to $5,000 per two-urn chamber, was built to help fund the school's new chapel. A meditative garden leads to the memorial, which sits behind a wall of white onyx that is illuminated from within to symbolize "the elusive separation between the living and the dead, a separation of a single breath," according to designer Susan Narduli. Colleges aren't the only institutions offering alternative burial space. A German soccer team recently announced plans to open a public cemetery next to its stadium, according to news reports. A similar idea was floated in San Diego a decade ago, when a businessman urged the Padres baseball team to install 70,000 cremation niches in the outfield wall of its new park. Despite a potential windfall of $175 million, Padres management balked at the proposal.**************** If Red Sox nation could put little cremains niches in the Green Monster with glass walls so you have an unobstructed view of Manny Ramirez running down fly balls... I might want to get half a dozen of those now just to stretch out and watch the game without getting beer spilled on me.

Since this is supposed to be a legal blog, there are a few things that you should know about the disposition of a corpse in Massachusetts. Under Massachusetts law your corpse is not the property of your executor or your probate estate. Your corpse belongs to your next of kin. Effectively there is an order of degrees or relations that Massachusetts law requires you to follow. Your spouse has first claim to your corpse (even that 24 hour romance in Vegas counts). We have had many a case of the new spouse (often known as the StepMonster, not to be confused with the Green Monster) burying or cremating their spouse completely contrary to the wishes of the family (and even the deceased spouse). After the spouse, the children have collective priority, an issue when they do not agree as to the disposition of the corpse. The most famous case happened in Red Sox Nation, when Ted Williams' family needed to go to probate court to decide whether the splendid splinter would be frozen or cremated. My advice as a lawyer is to pre-pay for your funeral. I have only had a couple of cases where the family would rather pay from their inheritance to arrange burial instead of taking the freebie.

NOTE - The response to the blog has been overwhelming, from best we can tell there are hundreds of regular readers already. I apologize again for using some words a little too much (you know the words: probate; Massachusetts law; Boston lawyer; real estate; estate planning; elder law; Medicaid), we expect that this will no longer be so necessary as the blog is added to its own server and web site soon. I also promise to bring you entries that relate to your interests and concerns. To do this, I need your input and ideas. Feel free to email me at Gosselin@GosselinLaw.com or add comments.

PS - The new building is near getting its permits, we expect the construction trailer to be on site next week and the fun to get started. To those that do not know, Gosselin & Associates, P.C. (from now forward to be known publicly as "Gosselin Law") is creating the largest and most modern law office ever in Winchester, Massachusetts (hey, can't fault me for bragging a little!). Seriously, we will have about 8,000sf of space, a conference facility seating about 60, several conference rooms, a full service kitchen, a gym with a personal trainer on staff, a children's room, all on site storage and a great parking lot - even a dog yard for my Australian Shepherd. My big headache at the moment is trying to figure out the difference between "Whisper Sage" and "Dusty Hemlock", those who know what this means, know what I mean. More construction updates as I get them. We hope to move in October or November.

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The other day I was asked how I became an elder law lawyer that handles real estate and probate matters. I responded in the usual manner that my father was a trial lawyer and my mother a nurse at a Massachusetts nursing home and I wanted to combine my quantitative aptitude with my interest in directly helping people. But, then I put a little more thought into what it was in my origins that passively educated me in dealing with real estate development, probate, elder law and other areas of Massachusetts law. It had a lot more to do with Saturday mornings.

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