New Edition!

Living trusts are popular estate planning tools, but when you’re chosen to serve as a trustee, you might wonder where to begin. The Trustee’s Legal Companion has everything you need to get organized, get started, and get the job done.

You’ll learn how to:

• decide whether to take on the job of trustee

• set up ongoing trusts for surviving spouses, children, or beneficiaries with special needs

• invest trust assets

• get help from lawyers, financial planners, and other experts

• handle taxes and prepare accountings

• work effectively with beneficiaries, and

• distribute trust property.

The authors—who have helped many a bewildered trustee—show you step by step how to administer a living trust with confidence.

“In Nolo you can trust.”—New York Times

“When it comes to self-help legal stuff, nobody does a better job than Nolo.”—USA Today

Order Now

Order Now

Is it OK to leave your children unequal shares of your assets? Here’s how the issue was framed in the Ethicist column on the New York Times Magazine:

This is the situation: An elderly parent has a fair amount of money and two children. One is wealthy with luxury properties, a spouse and no children. This child lives far away and visits only sporadically. The other lives near the parent, earns a modest salary, has children and several grandchildren and regularly visits and helps the elderly parent. This parent thinks it’s only fair to leave her children an equal share of her assets. Is this, in fact, ethical?

The ethicist analyzes it as I would, really. He notes that it may not, in fact, be fair to treat people who aren’t equal in life equally in an estate plan. But he goes on to say that the question of what makes people ‘equal‘ isn’t so easy to determine, especially in families. Clearly, he notes, these two children are not equal in terms of their own material wealth, nor in the care they’ve shown their parents over the years.

It might make economic sense to give more to the child who has less, because it will certainly make a larger difference to the poorer child to inherit assets when that parent dies. And it might make a certain kind of practical sense to give more to the child who has done more caretaking to that parent, though, as the ethicist rightly points out, “one reason money is a troublesome idiom for expressing gratitude here is that it awkwardly suggests a mercenary motive for those years of filial piety.”

Treating both children equally despite their differences makes them equal in this important way: that they are both the children of the same parent and that treating them equally avoids the problem of assessing their needs comparatively. In the end, the ethicist decides that it would be ethical either way.

But no one has ever asked me if it is ethical to leave their assets in different shares, they ask me if it is fair to do so. While I realize that the distinction between the two is slight, to me, ethical has to do with abstract moral principals, while fair gets to the nitty gritty of everyday parenting. One day, when my son was 3 or so, he wailed, “that’s not FAIR!” when his 8 year old sister gave him exactly 1/2 of a chocolate chip cookie. “Sam,” I said, “you got exactly as much of the cooke as Kate did, that’s the very definition of fair.” “But,” he cried, ‘it’s not what I wanted!” And, that to me, is what parents are really asking me –will my children think this is OK? Will they get what they wanted?

Here’s what I tell them. I tell them that “fair” is different in each family, and they have to be the judge of what’s fair for them. Fair might be giving more to one child with greater need or to recognize a child’s caretaking efforts over the years. But fair also might mean equal shares for everyone in the interest of maintaining family harmony after you’ve died.

“Certainly,” I also say, “whatever decision you make, it will be better respected if it isn’t a surprise.”

In the end, I agree with the ethicist’s conclusion: “If the estate were to be divided in a way that favored one child over the other, the parent should make it clear why doing so was consistent with each having an equal claim to the parent’s love.”

Proposition 19 Restricts Parent-Child Transfer of Low Property Tax Rates

As I’m sure all of you are all too aware, we just had a significant election on many levels. I’ll leave national commentary for others. For homeowners in California, though, Proposition 19 is making big changes to property tax rates upon the sale or transfer of property.

Proposition 19 has two main effects. The first makes big changes for homeowners over 55, or those who are severely disabled, or victims of fire, who want to sell their residence and purchase another home, either in their same county or elsewhere while keeping their current low property tax rate. While an important change for many of us, I want to focus here on the estate planning implications of Proposition 19, which stem from the second part of the law.

Proposition 19 makes significant changes to the basic rules for property tax transfers between parents and children (and grandparents to grandchildren) as of February of 2021. Spoiler alert: your children are most likely going to be paying more property taxes than you are.

Here are the basics. The complexities are still be worked out as the Board of Equalization and the County Assessors work to implement the new law.

PRIMARY RESIDENCES

If you leave your primary residence to your children at death, you WILL be able to transfer your property tax rate to them, but with new restrictions. The biggest restriction is that your children are going to have to use that residence as their primary residence, no later than one year after the date of transfer. (How does this work if there are multiple children? We don’t yet know.)

The property tax rate that you transfer to your children will be adjusted upward if the house is valued at more than $1 million plus your adjusted base-year value (the value on your property tax bill that the assessor uses to calculate the tax due, which is based on the purchase price with a small annual adjustment). To put this another way, if the house is currently valued at more than $1 million plus that adjusted base-year value, the kids will pay more than you were paying, but less than a new owner would pay, using a formula that is complex, but that results in excluding only $1 million from property tax reassessment.

OTHER REAL PROPERTY

Parents WON’T be able to transfer any additional real property to their children without a property tax reassessment. Until now, a parent could transfer up to $1 million in such property, calculated by using the adjusted base-year value (which was generally much lower than the current fair market value of property). In fact, Proposition 19 was motivated, in part, by public outrage at the “Lebowski loophole” reported by the LA Times, in which actor Jeff Bridges and his siblings were renting out their deceased father’s Malibu home for big bucks, while paying their father’s low inherited property tax rate.

PLANNING IMPLICATIONS

If you own rental or vacation properties and you want to preserve your current low property tax rates for your children, you might simply sell them these properties. You might also gift them these properties before February 15, 2021. Such a gift, however, has gift and income tax implications:

1. You will have to report the gift by April of the following year on a gift tax return, which will then reduce your lifetime gift and estate tax exemption by the fair market value of the gift.

1. Your children’s tax basis in the property will be your tax basis, which means if they sell the property, they will have to pay capital gains tax on the gain. If, for example, you purchased the property in 1980 for $200,000 and it is worth $1.2 million when your child sells it, they will owe capital gains on that $1 million of gain. Using 33% as a rough estimate of that tax, they will owe $330,000. If instead, they inherited that property at your death, and it was worth $1.2 million at that time, they would inherit it at that basis. If they sold it immediately, they would owe no capital gains at all. So, families need to identify their long term goals for a property—if it will be sold ultimately, the capital gains savings may be greater in the long-term than the property tax savings in the short term.

1. It won’t be your property anymore. If you want to use it, you will need to pay rent to the kids. If they want to remodel it, or fail to take care of it, or have to sell it as a result of divorce, you will have no control over those decisions.

Another option is to take advantage of the fact that the rules for property tax reassessment did not change for entities, like LLC’s, as a result of this election. Property held within an LLC does not get reassessed unless more than a 50% ownership interest is transferred. Lawyers, of course, have become adept at making sure that this majority control rule is not triggered.

EXAMPLES

Some families are taking advantage of this fact by combining gifting some of their interest in additional properties to their children and forming LLC’s, in various orders depending upon the facts, to both protect current low property tax rates now and prevent reassessment later when a parent dies.

Example: Mom owns a residence with a fair market value of $900,000. Her assessed value (that adjusted base-year value) is $300,000. When Mom dies, she leaves the house to her son, Lewis. Within one year of Mom’s death, Lewis makes the house his primary residence. Because the fair market value plus the assessed value (1.2 million) is not more than $1 million plus the assessed value ($1.3 million), there will be no reassessment for Lewis. Using a rate of 1.25%, he would owe $3750 per year in property tax, which is based on Mom’s assessed value of $300,000.

Example: Dad owns a residence with a fair market value of $2 million. His assessed value (that adjusted base-year value) is $500,000. When Dad dies, his daughter, June, inherits the house and makes it her primary residence. June will be taxed as if the property she inherited was worth $1 million. The calculation is this: she pays taxes on the current fair market value of the house ($2 million) – $1 million because that fair market value ($2 million) is more than Dad’s assessed value ($500k) plus $1 million ($1.5). If we use 1.25% as an estimated rate of property tax, her property tax bill would be $12,500 annually. Her Dad would have paid $6250. A new owner would pay $25,000.

Example: Mom owns a residence with a fair market value of $3 million. Her assessed value (that adjusted base-year value) is $53,000 because she and her now deceased husband bought the house in 1953. All of her three children already own their own homes. They decide to keep the property anyway, set up an LLC, and use it as a rental. The property will be reassessed at a value of $3 million, and the annual property taxes would be approximately $37,500 annually. Mom was paying $662.50 annually.

Welcome! You might be wondering why the world needs a new podcast, website and blog? Aren’t there enough already? Obviously, I disagree. Here’s why:

I’ve spent 20 years writing estate plans and I’ve met way too many women who think estate planning is boring, irrelevant, all about taxes, or somebody else’s problem. I don’t want any woman to feel that way.

I know for certain that you have enough information, enough education, and enough financial savvy to do what needs to be done, trust me.

I’m tired of seeing women feel intimidated by or dismissed by estate planning attorneys.

I’m tired of hearing women tell me that legal documents make them feel inadequate.

I’m tired of watching women feel helpless when a loved one dies or be overwhelmed by the burden of caring for others.

I’m tired of women avoiding the whole topic of estate planning because it scares them, only to see them live longer than the men in their lives.

So I decided to do something about it.

Women & Wills offers you engaging, empowering and effective tools to get your estate plan done and keep it up to date and relevant. Learn how to make better, more well-informed legal decisions and take action to protect your loved ones and yourself.

I hope to inspire you, educate you, and, hopefully, entertain you with information about best practices, real-life stories, and insights from experts in the fields of medicine, psychology, spirituality and whatever-else-I-can-think-of to help make estate planning relevant and important to your life.

I’m offering online courses, the podcast, and my books: all three are designed with the radical assumption that you, right now, are perfectly capable of understanding how an estate plan works and how to put one in place.

Imagine a free, entirely non-commercial outdoor music festival of bluegrass (and bluegrass adjacent artists) cherished by people all over the world. Imagine it drawing as many as 750,000 people to Golden Gate Park in San Francisco in the ‘before times,’ when such events were possible. Today, as I write this post, Hardly Stricly is broadcasting live on YouTube to a global audience, unstoppable, now known as Hardly Strictly Everywhere 2021. Last year, when it was also online, more than one million people watched it.

This is a legacy that Warren Hellman, a successful Wall Street investor who was once the head of Lehman Brothers and an amateur claw hammer banjo picker with a passion for bluegrass music, left the city of San Francisco, and now the world. Here he is quoted in a 2006 interview on NPR,

“ Some Texas oilman said money is like manure - I’m sure you’ve heard the statement - that if you spread it around, good things grow; and if you pile it up in one place, it just smells bad.

So the idea of doing this as a gift to a city that’s given everything to my family for, you know, 150 years just was very appealing.”

Started as a modest affair with 12-14 acts, including Hazel Dickens and Emmylou Harris, the festival has grown to a sprawling three-day festival with 27 acts performng roots and Americana, but also funk, rock, soul and more. Since Hellman’s death in 2011, the Hellman Foundation, created after his death and let by his family, has continued to support the festival as a free festival.

To Hellman, it was gift that also made him happy. In Forbes, in 2006, he said this:

“It’s a fantastically selfish gift, but it is a gift. There are hundreds of thousands of people there who are appreciating it. Just being able to do something that is completely not commercial, that is pure, hopefully, pleasure for the participants — to create a surrounding where the musicians and professionals like it as much as the crowd does. How could you have more fun than that? What the hell is money for if it isn’t for something like that?”

So, what’ s my point? While we all don’t have a dynastic fortune and the resources to create a legacy of this scale, we all have our passions, and we all have our joys, and it is my hope that Strictly Hardly Bluegrass can inspire each of us to consider how we can create joyous experiences for ourselves and our communities now, and consider how we can ensure that such things can continue after we’re gone.

The statistics these days are grim: more than 800,000 dead from COVID-19. The odds are that someone you know is facing the holiday season grieving for a loved one. What’s the best way to help?

Megan Devine, the author of several excellent books about grief, It’s OK That You’re Not OK & How to Carry What Can’t be Fixed, writes in a recent Instagram post,

“Grief has no expiration date. We carry our losses with us. Mentioning your person, keeping photos up, wearing a wedding ring, leaving a closet or bedroom just as it was, leaving favorite food in the cupboard - these are not signs of being stuck in grief. They’re evidence that your person was here, that they were part of your life.⁣⁣
⁣⁣Your grief - how you express it - is as individual as your love.⁣⁣”

I love this. In her work, Megan Devine, stresses that saying nothing about someone’s grief doesn’t help a grieving person. It can make them feel like no one cares or remembers the dead. It makes a person who is grieving feel invisible.

At her website, Refuge in Grief, she offers some tips for those who want to help, but don’t know how. Here’s some of her advice:

• Let a grieving person be in pain, don’t try and cheer them up.

• Acknowledgment, naming and recognizing that they have suffered great lose can, she says, “make things better, even when we can’t make things right.”

• Instead of trying to fix the problem, try something like “I”m sorry that this is happening, can you tell me about it?”

This year, of all years, all of us have an opportunity to learn a better way to respond to grief than denial and dismissal. I wish you all a season of deep listening, clear seeing, and love.

Last month, the Washington Post ran a story about the number of obituaries that were published, in roughly a year, that included a reference to casseroles—430 had been published in in American newspapers and on online platform Legacy.com. The article went on to say that the number of obituaries referencing casseroles on Legacy.com increased by 43 percent from 2019-2020.

Many of these obituaries were for people over the age of 75, a group which makes up more than half of COVID deaths in this country. But also, the article goes on to say, “the obituaries also hint at what we lost: shared meals and the people who cooked them.”

More than 80% of the obituaries were of women. Tuna and broccoli were the most frequently mentioned, not always favorably. But there were men, too, including a man from Syracuse, N.Y. famour for his melanzana casserole.

Food just says so much about who we are and what we value, doesn’t it? It doesn’t surprise me at all that during this pandemic we remember comfort food when we mourn the loss of a loved one. Cooking together and eating together, and the recipes that we followed to make that happen, bring up multi-sensory memories of smell, and taste, and sound, instantly.

Recipes, too, are so much of their own time and place—they can be like poems, really, each word important, and each line adding up to a larger whole, each dish firmly located in a particular place, and a particular time. This article reminds me of another project, the Kitchen Committe—in which a woman, Maggie Mason, found a plastic recipe box at a flea market with more than 800 recipes carefully organized and notated.

Maggie started to share the recipes on Instagram, posting one a day on Instagram. Followers on the site claim the posted recipe and promise to make it within a week, posting comments and feedback back to the Instagram feed.

Some favorites:

Home Baked Beans
Broccoli with Corn Cheese
Candied Sweet Potatoes

The project has a devoted following, with more than 2,000 followers. I love it for so many reasons: the devotion to recreating vintage recipes, the community created around the cooking and sharing, and the very idea that something so everyday as a recipe box can evoke long-buried memories of taste (Velveeta anybody?) and family meals eaten while young. As Maggie Mason said in the article, “for someone like me, who doesn’t have a family recipe box that’s been passed down, it can sort of become a surrogate family recipe box.”

And so, today, I leave you with this thought: what recipes would you most like to share with your loved ones right now? Would you go so far as to make a recipe book? A goggle doc with your favorites to share? A recipe of the month email or instagram post? I encourage you to consider how these simple legacies can mean so much, expecially now when being together in person is still so fraught.

Estate planning can be hard if you don’t have children, close family members, or friends to name as your Trustee, Executor or Agent under a Durable Power of Attorney for Finance or Health Care. I’ve worked with many clients who struggle with how to put a plan in place when they don’t know who to ask to serve in these capacities. Often, this is the reason that they’ve put off making a plan.

The truth is that single people need to have a plan in place even more than anyone else.

Without the proper documents in place, if a single person gets sick, no one will be able to pay their bills or make medical decisions for them without a court-ordered conservatorship. Without a Will or a living trust, when a person dies, the state’s rules determine who inherits their assets—which go to distant family members—often not what a person wants.

If you don’t have children or close family members or friends to ask to help you, and you’re not a person with tens of millions of dollars, you have three options, to my mind:

1. You can work with a professional licensed fiduciary, if your state licenses them, or a professional fiduciary if they don’t.

2. You can work with a bank that offers trust services.

3. You can work with a large financial services company that offers trust services.

Professional fiduciaries are individuals, often accountants, certified care managers, or lawyers, that serve as fiduciaries, which is a person who assumes the responsibility for the affairs of another person and will act in that person’s best interest. Two states, Arizona and California, have laws that require such professional fiduciaries to register with the state and be licensed to practice.

In California, the Professional Fiduciaries Bureau is under the California Department of Consumer Affairs. The Professional Fiduciary Association of California offers a directory of fiduciaries licensed to practice in the state.

In Arizona, licensing is offered through the Arizona Judicial Branch. The Arizona Fiduciaries Association offers a directory of fiduciaries licensed to practice in the state.

Many banks, though not all, offer trust services as well. If you already have an existing relationship with a bank, ask them if they offer such services. If they don’t, ask them for a referral to local banks that do.

Finally, some large finanical services company, like Charles Schwab, Vanguard, and Fidelity offer trust services as well. If you already have accounts with them, ask them about their trust services.

If you are looking for a professional to name in your estate plan, here are some questions to ask any of the trust service providers that I’ve described above:

1. Do they have a minimum size of an estate that they are willing to accept as a client?

2. What are their annual costs?

3. What services will they provide?

4. How much personal attention will they offer? Is there a specific trust officer assigned to each client?

5. Are they willing to serve as co-Trustee or co-Executor with a family member or friend?

6. Do they serve as an Agent under a Durable Power of Attorney for Health Care? (Many do not.)

7. If you are interviewing an individual fiduciary, ask them what will happen when they retire-many fiduciaries have younger people working for them, or a succession plan in place.

8. Is there specific language that they want to see in a living trust or Will? Big financial services companies often have pages of language that they want included, often language that will allow them to keep servicing your investments and make money off of doing so.

All of us need to have plans in place so that people can act for us if we are incapacitated, and to settle our estates and distribute our assets as we wish them to be distributed. It is harder for those without children, close friends or family, but there are professional services available to help.

The Wall Street Journal’s Clare Ansberry recently reported a story that is astonishing and important: Caring for Older Relatives Is So Expensive That Even AARP’s Expert Filed for Bankruptcy.

The article tells the story of Amy Goyer, the AARP’s family and caregiving expert. Despite having written two books on the subject and having her own consulting business, when both of her parents fell ill, she ended up relying on credit cards after her own finances were drained to pay for the cost of their care.

After more than 10 years of caring for her mother, who had a stroke, and her father, who had Alzheimer’s, she ended up filing for bankruptcy in 2019, having accumulated more than $100,000 in credit-card debt. In the last two years of her father’s life, his medical and in-home care expenses reached $10,000/month, $2,000/month more than he received from Social Security, pensions, long-term care insurance and Veterans Affairs benefits—-far more than many people have.

Amy is not alone, family caregivers provide an estimated $470 billion worth of free care. On average, according to an AARP study from 2021, caregivers like Amy spend 26% of their personal income on caregiving expenses. A third dip into personal savings and 12% take out a loan or borrow from family and friends.

The median annual cost of in-home care was $54,912 in 2020, up 18.5% according to a study quoted in the WSJ story.

Most of us assume that Medicare will pay for long-term care, but it doesn’t, and private long-term care insurance is expensive and the companies that offer it are constantly reducing the benefits.

Concerns about the toll long-term care is taking is behind recently introduced legislation, the Credit for Caring Act, which would provide a tax credit to eligible caregivers. But, of course, that’s not been passed.

So, what to do? First, make a plan with your family members that addresses what to do if and when there will be a need for family caregiving before there is a crisis. Second, if you are a family caregiver yourself, recognize that family caregiver burden is real, and find resources in your community for help. Third, let your elected officials know that more needs to be done.

Last, listen to my podcast conversation with Dr. Jessica Zitter about her new movie, Caregiver: A Love Story.

And click here for Family Caregiver Resources, with deep appreciation to Dr. Jessica Zitter for sharing.

This week, the New Yorker posted a tweet highlighting the work of Lee Friedlander, a photographer who has (among many other things) taken beautiful pictures of his wife over more than 60 years. It is an incredible testament to the way that time passes so quickly for all of us, even when it doesn’t feel that way.

If all of us could see our families documented in this way, would we be more careful to make time to spend together and to save our memories for those who come after us?

It is so easy, after all, to get caught up in the every day hustle of surviving, and to forget how astonishingly short our time together really is.

Estate planning is one of those projects that shocks us into remembering our true task at hand—to marvel at what we have, even as it slips so quickly away.

Read the full story

This weekend I got a call from an old friend. Her mother’s health is failing and she was flying across the country to try and get her the care she needs. Her mother is in her 90’s, has multiple ailments and multiple doctors. No one, it seems, has been coordinating her care and each specialist has been prescribing medicines without considering her care in an integrated manner. As a result, my friend reported, her mother seems to be over medicated, uncomfortable and in constant pain. The family feels that no doctor is able to help her manage her symptoms and they are struggling to provide her with adequate support. Unfortunately, this happens often.

I suggested that my friend seek a palliative care consultation for her mother, so that her care could be coordinated with a focus on providing her with an improved quality of life. My friend said that her mother’s primary care doctor had told her that palliative care wasn’t available because, “her mother didn’t have a terminal diagnosis.”

Her doctor, like many people, was confusing hospice care with palliative care. Unfortunately, this also happens often.

To put it bluntly, that doctor was wrong. Palliative care is a resource for anyone living with serious illness, it doesn’t require a terminal diagnosis at all. Palliative care teams are made up of an interdisciplinary team of professionals—and can include doctors, nurses, social workers, nutritionists and even chaplains for spirtual support. The goal is to improve the quality of life for the seriously ill and their families. At its best, palliative care can address physical, mental, spiritual and social needs.

Palliative care can be provided in hospitals, but not just there—it can be provided in nursing homes, assisted living facilities, clinics, or even at home. Some insurance policies will pay for it. Getting palliative care does not require that a person give up treatment for their serious illness either. Palliative care can help symptoms such as:

• Pain

• Nausea

• Anxiety

• Depression

• Fatigue

• Trouble sleeping

My friend’s doctor was, it seems, thinking about hospice care when he told my friend that her mother required a terminal diagnosis. Hospice care does require that a doctor think someone is likely to die within six months (although you can extend hospice care if a patient is still alive after that time). And unlike palliative care, in hospice care treatment for the underlying illness is stopped.

Hospice care is appropriate for those who are eligible for it. But palliative care is an option for anyone, like my friend’s mother, who is seriously ill and needs help managing multiple illnesses and symptoms.

Here are some resources for information about palliative care:

National Institue on Aging

Get Palliative Care.org

National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization

Emily offers fascinating insights into why money can be such a hard thing to talk about, and tips for helping to get these conversations started. I asked her to be on my show because, so often, a long, uncomfortable silence falls across the room when my clients begin to sort out who owns what in a marriage, or how parents want their children to treat an inheritance. As Emily points out, avoiding open and honest communications about money (like avoiding the same kinds of conversations about death and illness) means a missed opportunity for learning about ourselves, our families, and our most closely held values and hopes. I hope you enjoy it.

To read more: Emily is the co-author, with Emily Chase Smith, of Beginner’s Guide to Purposeful Prenups and the author of Estate Planning for the Blended Family.

Follow me on:

twitter.com/lifedeathlaw

Instagram.com/lifedeathlaw

facebook.com/LifedDeathLaw

Linkedin.com/in/lizahanks

Join me for a candid discussion with Dr. Elizabeth Landsverk, a board-certified physician in Internal medicine, Geriatric medicine, and Palliative care medicine. She’s also the founder of ElderConsult Geriatric Medicine, a practice that offers house-call based medicine to seniors and their families.

Elizabeth offers practical help for those dealing with dementia: how to know if it’s time to take a loved one to be evaluated; what kind of cognitive and behavioral symptoms to worry about (or not to worry about); how to find the right doctor; avoid the wrong medications and offer a loved one with dementia the best possible quality of life. Join us!

Follow me on:

twitter.com/lifedeathlaw

Instagram.com/lifedeathlaw

facebook.com/LifedDeathLaw

Linkedin.com/in/lizahanks

What is estate planning, really? I know that most lawyers focus on reducing taxes, or the creation of documents, but when you get down to it, what you’re really doing when you make an estate plan is giving everything away, right?

So, to me, understanding the practice of generosity and what gets in the way of being generous are central to effective estate planning, and who better to explore that territory than my guest for episode 3 of Life/Death/Law: Myoshin Kelley, an eloquent teacher on the key Buddhist teachings on the wisdom of opening the heart. Myoshin is a Senior Instructor with the Tergar Community, which supports the worldwide vision of Tibetan master meditation teacher and author Mingyur Rinpoche, tergar.org, and it is an honor to have her on the podcast.

Follow me on:

twitter.com/lifedeathlaw

Instagram.com/lifedeathlaw

facebook.com/LifedDeathLaw

Linkedin.com/in/lizahanks

I asked Dr. Waterman to be on the show because many of the people that I work with, and many of the people listening to this show, struggle with talking appropriately, and effectively, to kids (of all ages) about death and dying. These conversations can be around the death of a beloved grandparent, or about the process of estate planning, or, even, between adult children and elderly parents, about the reality of end of life planning.

If you have ever struggled with how to talk honestly and openly about death and dying with your children or your parents, and honestly, who hasn’t?, I think you’ll enjoy listening to today’s show.

Follow me on:

twitter.com/lifedeathlaw

Instagram.com/lifedeathlaw

facebook.com/LifedDeathLaw

Linkedin.com/in/lizahanks

You will learn how to use Google’s Inactive Account Manger to control access to your digital assets (like email, videos, images, and documents) and why service providers (like Google, Apple, facebook, and Yahoo) can’t give anyone access to your stored electronic communications without your consent, or a court order.

If you’ve ever worried about what will happen to your digital life after you die (and who hasn’t), please listen.

To read more about Digital Estate Planning, download my free ebook.

Follow me on:

twitter.com/lifedeathlaw

Instagram.com/lifedeathlaw

facebook.com/LifedDeathLaw

Linkedin.com/in/lizahanks

Dr. Ungerleider also (when not producing movies and making social change) works as an internist practicing hospital medicine at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco. She received her medical degree from Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, OR and completed residency at California Pacific Medical Center where she is now on the teaching faculty and serves on the Executive Board of the Foundation Board of Trustees.

Extremis, which is about end of life decision making in the ICU at Oakland’s Highland Hospital, won best Documentary Short at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2017, and was nominated for an Academy Award and two Emmies. End Game recently premiered at Sundance, and is about palliative care and end of life planning in the face of terminal illness, and was filmed at UCSF and Zen Hospice, in San Francisco. Both movies are heartfelt, engaging, honest and important. They show, without preaching, how important it is for your loved ones to know what you do and don’t want at end of life and how palliative care and hospice can add quality to that time.

Dr. Ungerleider is also the founder of the End Well conference, which will take place on December 6, 2018 in San Francisco. The conference is a dynamic convening of design, tech, health care, policy, media, the arts and activist communities committed to generating human-centered, interdisciplinary innovation for the end of life experience. I can’t wait to attend.

If you would like to know more about how to prepare yourself or your loved ones for an empowered end of life, and how to talk to your family about what you do and don’t want at the end of life, please listen to today’s show.

Here are links to the resources that Dr. Ungerleider mentions on the show:

1. Go Wish-card game conversation starter.

2. Five Wishes Advance Directive.

3. Getpalliative.org - resources on palliative care

Follow me on:

twitter.com/lifedeathlaw

Instagram.com/lifedeathlaw

facebook.com/LifedDeathLaw

Linkedin.com/in/lizahanks

Dr. Jessica Zitter is Harvard and UCSF-trained to practice the unusual combination of Critical and Palliative Care medicine. She works as an Attending Physician at a public hospital in Oakland, California.

She is a regular contributor to The New York Times and her articles have appeared in The Atlantic, Time Magazine, Journal of the American Medical Association, The Washington Post and many other publications.

Dr. Zitter’s work is featured in the Academy and Emmy-nominated short documentary “Extremis,” available on Netflix. Her media appearances include CBS Sunday Morning, NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross, The Doctors, The Leonard Lopate Show, and a Dr. Oz special, “The Death Show.”

If you’ve ever been frustrated with a doctor that doesn’t listen to you and wondered how to talk to them effectively, or worried about who to name as your health care agent, or are interested in finding out more about palliative care, please listen to this episode.

To learn more about Dr. Zitter, please go to her website., www.jessicazitter.com.

Please follow me at:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/lifedeathlaw
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LizaHanksAuthor
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lizahanks

If you have ever struggled with how best to support a loved one as they confront old age, sickness, and death, or wondered what you can do, now, to make sure that your old age is as independent and healthy as possible and that your death be a natural one surrounded by love, listen to Katy Butler.

Follow me on:

twitter.com/lifedeathlaw

Instagram.com/lifedeathlaw

facebook.com/LifedDeathLaw

Linkedin.com/in/lizahanks