Some Unusual Advice
Not in a million years would I have thought I’d recommend that people get legally married. But in some cases – I do. Harry and his partner Sally lived together in a house they bought in Oakland in the 1980s, at a very low price and with a very low California property tax basis. They’d both been in bad marriages, so they vowed to never get legally married. They each owned 50% of their house as tenants in common, and each paid half the bills. Flash forward nearly 40 years later. Sally has now died and, yes, she had a trust leaving her half of the house to Harry, which is good. The problem is...
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Tom and Judy live in a four-bedroom house in Berkeley that they think of as belonging to both of them. Tom bought the house 20 years ago and after he met and married Judy, he never thought to do anything different when the property tax bills kept coming in his name alone. He simply paid those bills out of their joint checking account, the one they both deposited their paychecks into. Well after Tom’s and Judy’s kids from previous marriages had long since gone off to college, Tom and Judy made their way to an attorney’s office to start planning their wills and trusts. The attorney...
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