Navigator

What I've Been Reading: A Beginner's Guide to the End: Practical advice for living life and facing death by BJ Miller, MD and Shoshana Berger published in 2019. A Beginner's Guide to the End: Practical advice for living life and facing death is an excellent resource that covers a broad swath of material.  Divided into 5 sections, the authors provide the reader with thoughts, suggestions, sample questions and other tips from the financial aspects of end-of-life care to asking for help to pre-planning a funeral/burial.  The breadth of material covered is wide, perhaps the widest I've seen in any one book.  With that breadth comes a lack of depth.  That is not necessarily a negative -- the breadth shows the reader the wide range of issues to address and dips into each.  A reader would then seek out more thorough information on any one topic of interest.  For example, estate planning is covered in less than 5 pages, yet it is a topic I can speak about for...

Glancing out my kitchen window early this morning, coffee in hand as I kick-started my day, I noticed "the boys" were in our driveway.  Over the summer months a flock of 5 to 7 wild male turkeys became "the boys" in our household as they made daily visits and precarious crossings of the fast moving artery on which we live.  Out of the corner of my eye I noticed my husband was set to leave for work, it was a great day for his 8-mile commute along Madison's bike paths.  Without thinking I warned "be careful when you take your bike out, when "the boys" get confused they run in circles and the last thing we need this morning is a couple of turkeys dashing into our garage!"  As we move into our 14th year of marriage my husband has grown accustomed to my dire predictions, yet today he raised his eyebrows just enough to convey "really Melinda, what are the chances?"  My standard response "Well, you married a lawyer.  I was trained ...

Beneficiary Forms Gone Horribly Wrong. By Melinda Gustafson Gervasi Within the legal community there is a decent amount of discussion about whether or not our professional lives will be usurped by on-line and digital platforms.  Days like today reassure me that my professional life has a few good years, decades even, before a software engineer codes me out of business. Take life insurance and children for instance.  New client call comes in.  Brief biographical information is provided related to: marital status, children, and financial instruments.  In short, caller is single with a minor child and his best friend from college is named as beneficiary of the life insurance because friend is a responsible adult who will do the right thing.  An actual attorney will likely hear this and say, "wait, tell me that again please" as her eyebrows rise higher on her forehead.  In contrast, your standard online will-writer will prompt "check here if you have na...

Busting Myths & Misconceptions: Reflections on The Grand Budapest Hotel, a Wes Cravin Film. By Melinda Gustafson Gervasi From Hollywood to Netflix to TV dramas, legal thrillers remain a popular film genre.  Recently I enjoyed watching The Grand Budapest Hotel , a Wes Craven film.  Set in a fictional remote mountain village somewhere near the borders of Germany, Switzerland, and France, it is a quirky film revolving around the owner succession of a grand hotel. There is the requisite scene for a legal drama: " the reading of the will".  From the deceased's children to her cousins thrice-removed, all assemble in a dark cavernous room, dressed in black, with an attorney at the center of attention.  Here the legal misconceptions leap off the screen: Except in limited circumstances, the attorney who drafts a will is not the Executor (or what Wisconsin law calls the Personal Representative) of the will; The will in the movie is a massive heap of papers, of wh...

As Summer 2019 begins its slide towards September our family strives to complete our annual License Plate Game.   It's a great way to reinforce the fact the United States is made up of 50 different states (for our elementary aged kids), all with different plates.....and sets of laws about estate planning & probate. Unlike federal law, such as immigration, which is the same from Maine to California, estate planning and probate laws are written at the State level.  Leaving us with 50 different sets of laws about who is in charge and where things go upon your death, as well as next of kin's ability (or lack of) to make medical and financial decisions if you are alive, but too ill to act. Keep this in mind when you are reading materials for a national audience.  For example, mass produced materials about estate planning claim the fee for a court to oversee the transfer of probate assets (those assets that do not have a designation or label on them about where ...

Be Alert! Image by M. Gustafson Gervasi 2019 Once upon a time an elderly women, Agnes, went into her bank to review her accounts.  Behind the desk sat an eager and chipper 23 year old "banker".  With good intentions of providing the best banking services possible, the young banker encouraged the older women to add her daughter to her bank accounts in order to "make things easier."  Relying on her long relationship and established trust with the bank, Agnes took the advice.  When the door closed upon Agnes' exit, her daughter, Anne, had been made a joint owner of the bank account. Time passed and Agnes' health took a turn, with her earthly life ending six months after the bank visit.  Grieving, yet still functioning, Anne set about taking care of Agnes' affairs.  One day she went into the bank to settle her mother's accounts, death certificate in hand.  To her surprise, the 23 year old banker informed Anne about the joint ownership of the accoun...

Pop quiz:  What year (estimated) will the dead outnumber the living on Facebook? A)   2070 B)   2056 C)   2031 D)   2103 Click on this link to find the answer .  If the link is broken, the answer will be at the bottom of this post.  The year itself is not the point, but rather the concept of all the digital data / refuse that will linger in cyber space long after our earthly years have come to an end.  Many Americans already feel smothered by piles of paper, cheap plastic toys kids bring home from birthday parties, and closets full of clothing from bygone eras.  Pile on top of that our digital clutter, and add the weight of the amount of energy required to keep the servers running that store it all, and you may be inclined to throw your arms up in the air in despair. Clutter and chaos engulf M. Gustafson Gervasi's home. 2019 To purge or not to purge, that is the question.  What kind of digital footprint...

Image by M.  Gustafson Gervasi, 2019 Peonies unfolding in the warm sun.  June is nearly here.  With it a memory dances in my mind.  June 1991 and my mother fussed about the peony plants that circled our back deck.  Delicate, vibrant, gone too quickly -- her wish was for those flowers to be there for my high school graduation party.  Mother nature granted mom her wish.  Peonies in full bloom were the backdrop for many photos that day. All of these years later (has it really been 28 years!) those very plants still bloom in June, just in a new location.  My mother left her earthly life in February of 2014.  Despite her passing in the depths of a Wisconsin winter, I was able to transplant the peonies from the backyard of her ranch home to the flower bed in front of my ranch house.  All it took was a simple request from the new owners for me to return when the soil had thawed. With the plethora of how-to books on estate planning, prob...

My workdays are spent at the office, talking with clients about illness, death and taxes.  My evenings and weekends usually allow some downtime for me to indulge my inner bookworm.  Recently I took a break from the Nordic Noir series I've been reading and picked up a book recommended by a dear friend, The Death of Mrs. Westaway by Ruth Ware . The book opens with an introduction to Hal, a young women in her early 20s scraping out a living reading tarot cards on a pier in Brighton, England.  We learn that her mother, and only family, was killed in a hit and run accident when Hal was barely 18.  She is alone, broke, and avoiding a loan shark she now knows was a mistake.  And then a letter arrives along with her growing bills.  An attorney from Penzance, England wrote, informing her that she is an heir to her late grandmother's estate.  An heir?  Hal's maternal grandparents were dead, and she had no clue who her father was.  And so the myst...