Estate Planning, Probate, Asset Protection, and
Business Lawyer in Arizona, New Jersey, & Pennsylvania
“By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.”
– Benjamin Franklin
“If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up someplace else.”
– Yogi Berra
Sluder Law Firm PLC provides experienced legal counsel services that can give you the solid footing needed to stand strong and seize life—CARPE VITAM!
LIFE HAPPENS. And when it does, it can feel like being caught in the surf, wave after wave just beating, wearing, tearing you down. The key to having the solid footing needed to prevail is having a good, proactive foundation upon which to stand, a plan.
Waiting for life to happen and then reacting is like trying to stand on loose, shifting sand—it can take tremendously more energy and effort to stand strong.
“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” So goes the old saying. What twenty years of practicing law has shown is that when it comes to legal matters, an ounce of legal prevention can be worth a TON of cure.
There are few things in this world more frustrating, exhausting, and insanely expensive as litigation. A good planning attorney, whether they are helping plan how to administer your estate or plan out a successful business relationship, needs to be Nostradamus, a fortune teller, a soothsayer in order to predict and address all the different ways you might lose your footing, legally speaking.
“There are dreamers and there are planners; the planners make their dreams come true.”
- Edwin Louis Cole
“Planning is bringing the future into the present so that you can do something about it now.”
- Alan Lakein
An ounce of prevention may take the form of:
A properly structured asset protection plan limiting a plaintiff’s recovery efforts to the maximum amount of the client’s insurance coverage ($1M), significantly less than what the plaintiff was seeking ($5M+).
A single member LLC having a written operating agreement making it manager-managed and the client the sole Manager, which a judge held was sufficient evidence to support a ruling in favor of the client.
A client owning a rental property in an LLC instead of their own name, personally, in order to limit any liability related to the rental property to the assets of the LLC—which should be the one rental property and nothing else—preventing any plaintiffs from reaching the personal assets of the client (their home, investment account, vacation home, etc.).
An estate plan properly structured so the heirs receive the assets at a “stepped up basis”—meaning their tax basis is the fair market value of the asset at the time of death, not when the person bequeathing first acquired the property, which could avoid the heir owing a substantial amount of capital gains taxes.
An estate plan properly structured so that an inheritance can be held in trust for (and used for the benefit of) an heir who is not yet old/mature enough to handle receiving a significant of amount of cash and other assets outright, who suffers from substance abuse, is incapacitated such that receiving an inheritance outright will negatively affect their governmental benefits, or who is going through a divorce or facing creditor issues.
“Intellectuals solve problems, geniuses prevent them.”
- Albert Einstein
“An hour of planning can save you 10 hours of doing.”
- Dale Carnegie
“The way to get started is to quit talking and start doing.”
- Walt Disney
“A goal without a plan is just a wish.”
- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Practice Areas
Estate planning is the process of arranging for the transfer of your assets upon your death. Effective estate planning will help preserve your assets and leave them for the intended beneficiaries, while giving you the ability to change beneficiaries prior to your death. Plus, you can eliminate the uncertainties that often lead to painful and expensive family conflicts and avoid leaving your loved ones the additional burden of dealing with an unplanned estate. Drafting an effective estate plan is like planting a shade tree today for your family to enjoy for generations—but an ineffective estate plan could be worse than no plan at all.
Probate is the legal process where a court manages the distribution of the assets that you own (your “estate”) when you pass away, after all of your bills are paid. The probate process is the general administering of your Will or your estate if you die intestate (without a Will). The probate court will appoint the Executor (male) or Executrix (female) (also often called a “Personal Representative”) who is named in your Will, or it will appoint someone if there is no Will.
Everyone wants to protect their assets. Experienced legal counsel can help identify potential risks and work to mitigate those risks. From landlords, business owners, and professionals, to retirees wanting to protect the equity in their home from Medicaid (or other) “estate recovery” liens, Sluder Law Firm can help.
This highly specialized asset protection tool can be the difference between your home (and other assets) going to your loved ones or having to be sold to pay the back the state for care you received before passing away.
Even the most honest, well-intentioned parties, acting with the utmost good faith, can have an honest misunderstanding, and even the smallest honest misunderstanding can snowball into a major dispute, one that leads to expensive, time-consuming litigation. Oral agreements, and even ones hashed out via email and/or text, are notoriously hard to enforce and, when enforceable, usually fail to consider all of the possible ways things can go sideways. An experienced business attorney can help ensure that all parties involved are operating from the same, well-written and easily-understood, page(s)—and that everyone understands that the contract is the deal.
From making sure your new business name and/or logo don’t infringe on someone else’s intellectual property, to helping you protect your branding, Sluder Law Firm is here to help.
