As important as your saving and spending habits are, being truly financially responsible involves much more. To this end, I’ve put together a list of ten ways to cover your ass(ets)… This list is by no means exhaustive, but it’s a good starting point. [more]

Here’s Part IV of my thoughts on Consumer Reports’ ten steps to simplifying your financial life. Today we’ll be covering steps 9-10… [more]

Now that we’ve had a chance to put our estate plan together (finally!), I though that I’d share some details on how we set things up. Hopefully this will help others who are trying to figure out the same sorts of things. Or maybe it will inspire those who have been putting it off (like we did for too long) to finally get things taken care of. Anyway, I digress… [more]

In late November, I wrote about the fact that we were finally putting together an estate plan. Well, last Friday, just before everything shut down for the Holidays, my wife and I finally put the whole “last will and testamentary trust” thing to rest… And not a moment too soon, as this was one of our New Year’s Resolutions dating back to January 1, 2006. Even though it took 11.75 months to get it done, it still counts. Right?

Nearly eleven months into 2006 (and almost a year and a half after I first wrote about this), we finally took a solid step toward fulfilling one of our New Year’s Resolutions… Putting together an estate plan. I actually debated about using LegalZoom to put together our wills, but we ultimately decided against it. Instead, my wife and I met with a local attorney yesterday morning to set the wheels in motion. And no, it wasn’t the $100 guy — something about him just didn’t sit right. [more]

The other day I dropped by our insurance agent’s office and, on the way back to the car, I noticed that he’s located directly adjacent to an attorney’s office. So, on a whim, I popped in to get a rough idea of how it would cost to have a will prepared. It’s been over a year since I first wrote about needing to update our wills, and we’re still sitting on our hands. [more]

At long last… I finally got around to reading “Crash Course in Estate Planning: The Essential Guide to Wills, Trusts, and Your Personal Legacy” by Michael Palermo. I first mentioned this book over the summer, but didn’t get around to picking up a copy and looking through it until recently. In very general terms, this book is a good, non-technical reference on the ins and outs of estate planning. [more]

I just ran across a relatively new book on estate planning called “Crash Course in Estate Planning : The Essential Guide to Wills, Trusts, and Your Personal Legacy” by Michael Palermo. It’s published by AARP, so it may end up being targeted more toward retirees than to people like me (particularly the young kids angle), but it looks like it may be good background reading if nothing else. If anyone has read this, I’d love to hear your feedback. If not, it looks like my local library has a copy. I’ll report back once I’ve had a chance to look it over.

Update: Here’s my review of Crash Course in Estate Planning.

As a followup to my earlier post about needing a will, I ran across a list of tips for preparing your estate plan. Among the twelve easy steps are… [more]

My wife and I have been making do with a pair of old, do-it-yourself wills that I prepared using an old version of WillMaker (formerly from Nolo Press, now an Intuit product). To give you an idea of just how old this software is, it’s not even Y2K ready — the last time I updated our wills (about four years ago) I had to manually edit the output file to change the year from 1901 to 2001. Anyway, things have changed dramatically for us in the past few years. Both our finances and family have grown. In fact, our two youngest kids aren’t even mentioned in our wills. Thus, it seems like it’s time for an update. [more]