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The Future Estate
Volume 6, Issue 5, May 2015
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| About My Firm
Law Office of Christopher Guest, PLLC
888 16th St., NW, Suite 800
Washington, DC 20006
703.237.3161 (VA)
703.574.5654 (Fax)
Admitted in DC, VA, MD and NY
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Law Office of Christopher Guest
A Law Office Planning for the Future
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Wow! The temperatures are definitely signaling that summer has arrived. I hope you have your summer plans in order as forecasters are calling for a hotter than normal summer.
With that, let's talk about estate planning. This month's topics include: what are powers of appointment, what do slayer statutes do and the estate of the month is Dean Smith's bequests to his former players.
Sincerely,
Chris
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What are Powers of Appointment? 
When drafting an estate plan, the main goal is to create a plan that meets the desires and needs of the client with a focus on the eventual distribution of the client's assets to the client's heirs. However, incorporating some level of flexibility into a plan to account for unforeseen changes can be beneficial. One way to provide flexibility is to include "powers of appointment" into a testator's last will and testament.
A power of appointment ("POA") is clause in the will where the testator, the person writing the will, selects a person who will be given the authority to dispose of certain property that is controlled by the will. There are generally three "people" involved in a POA. The person receiving the property under the POA is typically called the appointee. The person granting the power of appointment is called the donor, testator, or grantor. The person holding the power to distribute the property is typically called donee or the holder. Thus, under a very basic example of a power of appointment in a will written as such "I leave my baseball card collection to be distributed as my brother Joe sees fit," the holder would be Joe, I would be the grantor and whomever Joe decided to inherit the baseball cards would be the appointee...
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| Basics of Estate Planning: What are Slayer Statutes? 
If you are a fan of TV crime dramas, like Castle or CSI, you know one of the fallback plots for an episode is to have someone kill a family member allowing that person to collect their inheritance sooner than if the family member died later on of natural causes. Unfortunately, these types of cases appear in real life more regularly than you would think. Recently, an Arlington County Circuit Judge sentenced a son to life in prison for hiring two men to kill his father because the son needed money. Yes, the story is even sadder when you note that the father was terminally ill. Trying to avoid those temptations, many states have what is known as "slayer" statutes that prevent a person convicted of murder from collecting the inheritance the slayer would normally receive if the decedent had not died from the slayer's actions. In short, the community doesn't want slayers from "profiting" from killing someone and this article will get into more of the reasoning behind that.
More in the May 2015 Newsletter
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Estate of the Month:
A
fter compiling a record of 879-254 over 36 seasons, former North Carolina Tar Heels basketball coach Dean Smith
died
on February 7th, 2015, at 83 years of age. Smith coached the the Tar Heels from 1961 to 1997, and retired as the winningest coach in college basketball history (he has since been
passed
by Mike Krzyzewski, Jim Boeheim, and Bob Knight). Along the way he won two national championships, 13 ACC Tournament titles, went to 11 Final Fours, won an NIT championship, and coached team USA to the gold medal at the 1976 Summer Games . In addition to his on-court accomplishments, Smith also was selected as Sports Illustrated's Sportsman of the Year in 1997, won the Arthur Ashe Award for Courage, and in 2013 received the Presidential Medal of Freedom Award . Ironically, in 1991, he became the first, and is still the only, basketball coach to be
ejected
from a Final Four game. Smith was also inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1983 and the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame in 2006. Of the players he coached, more than 50 of them played professionally in either the United States or abroad, and more than 95% percent of his lettermen earned their college degrees.
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Disclaimer:
An e-mail, fax, letter, or phone call to or from my office does not create an attorney-client relationship. An engagement agreement must be signed by both the attorney and the client to establish an attorney-client relationship with the Law Office of Christopher Guest, PLLC
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| Copyright ? 2015 Law Office of Christopher M. Guest, PLLC |
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This newsletter was prepared by the Law Office of Christopher Guest, PLLC as a service to clients and friends of the firm. It is not intended as a source of specific legal advice. This Newsletter may be considered attorney advertising under the rules in some states. Prior results described in this newsletter cannot and do not guarantee or predict a similar outcome with respect to any future matter that the firm or any lawyer may be retained to handle. Case results depend on a variety of factors unique to each case and circumstance.
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