Guides for real money decisions

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 wrote the strictest execution rule in the country into them: two witnesses present at the same time PLUS a notary. Most states require only notarization; a New […]

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 July 31, 2026. Quick answer: yes — Texas authorizes transfer-on-death deeds (Estates Code ch. 114, since September 1, 2015), and the trap is in the fine print: a Texas TOD deed that omits the statutory notice required by §114.051 is invalid. The warning language about revocability and beneficiary rights is […]

Updated July 31, 2026. Quick answer: nine ages govern retirement money, and each is a different KIND of deadline — some are exact dates, some are calendar years, one is a 7-month window, and one depends on your birth year. The chart, with each age linked to its full rule: Age What unlocks or triggers […]