Guides for real money decisions

Guides › Settling an Estate Updated July 31, 2026. Quick answer: it depends on three questions asked in order, and the statute is only the third. (1) How is the house titled? Joint tenancy or a TOD deed passes it outside intestacy entirely — the will-less split never touches it. (2) Is it community or […]

Guides › Settling an Estate Updated July 31, 2026. Quick answer: in a blended family with no will, the surviving spouse almost never “gets everything” — and the generic formula articles quote is wrong twice over. The Uniform Probate Code’s own text (§2-102(4)) cuts the spouse’s share specifically when the decedent leaves children who are […]

Guides › Settling an Estate Updated July 31, 2026. Quick answer: divorce quietly breaks the machinery that was paying your income tax. Joint withholding stops covering you, support payments arrive with nothing withheld, and the safe-harbor math resets — so the first post-divorce year is when career W-2 employees suddenly owe quarterly estimated payments and […]

Guides › Settling an Estate Updated July 31, 2026. Quick answer: your divorce decree does not change who your 401(k) pays. For employer retirement plans and employer life insurance, federal law preempts the state statutes that automatically revoke an ex-spouse’s beneficiary designation — the Supreme Court settled it in Egelhoff v. Egelhoff, 532 U.S. 141 […]

Guides › Settling an Estate Updated July 31, 2026. Quick answer: COBRA after a divorce runs on two separate 60-day clocks, and missing the first one is fatal: (1) someone — you, your ex, or the decree’s lawyer, but legally it is on the qualified beneficiary — must notify the employer’s plan of the divorce […]

Guides › Settling an Estate Updated July 31, 2026. Quick answer: the IRS reads one date — your marital status on December 31 decides your filing status for the whole year, so a decree on December 30 versus January 2 rewrites an entire year’s taxes. But the fork is not as binary as the articles […]

Guides › Transfer-on-Death Deeds Updated July 31, 2026. Quick answer: no — Michigan has never adopted a TOD deed statute for real property. What Michigan has instead is the country’s most established Lady Bird deed practice: a common-law enhanced life estate deed, recognized in Michigan practice for decades and treated by the State Bar’s own […]

Guides › Transfer-on-Death Deeds Updated July 31, 2026. Quick answer: yes — New York finally authorized TOD deeds effective July 19, 2024 (Real Property Law §424), and it requires a demanding execution formality: two witnesses present at the same time PLUS a notary. Some states require only notarization; a New York TOD deed signed with […]

Guides › Transfer-on-Death Deeds Updated July 31, 2026. Quick answer: yes — and it is new. Georgia’s transfer-on-death deed law (O.C.G.A. Title 44, Ch. 17) took effect July 1, 2024, which is why most national lists still wrongly count Georgia as a no. Before that, Georgia practitioners used Lady Bird deeds as the workaround; the […]

Guides › Transfer-on-Death Deeds Updated July 31, 2026. Quick answer: no — Florida does not have transfer-on-death deeds for real estate, and the widely repeated claim that a 2024 law created them is false. The statute those articles cite, Fla. Stat. §732.4015, governs homestead devise restrictions — we pulled the current text to check, and […]

Guides › Transfer-on-Death Deeds Updated July 31, 2026. Quick answer: California authorizes revocable transfer-on-death deeds (Prob. Code §§5600–5696) — with a fact almost no article mentions: the entire statute sunsets January 1, 2032 unless the legislature extends it again. Deeds executed before a repeal would survive, but a plan that assumes the tool exists forever […]

Guides › Transfer-on-Death Deeds Updated October 2, 2026. Quick answer: yes. Texas authorizes transfer on death deeds under Estates Code chapter 114, for deeds executed and acknowledged on or after September 1, 2015. Section 114.055 sets three requirements for the deed to be effective: it must contain the essential elements and formalities of a recordable […]