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Guides › Settling an Estate Updated July 31, 2026. Quick answer: whether the house is separate or marital property usually comes down to four facts: when it was bought (before the marriage leans separate), what money maintained it (marital earnings paying the mortgage or funding the remodel pull it toward marital, at least in part), […]

Guides › Settling an Estate Updated July 31, 2026. Quick answer: community-property and common-law states do not just use different percentages for a will-less estate — they divide different pools of property by different machinery. In the nine community-property states, the surviving spouse already owns half of everything earned during the marriage; that half never

Guides › Settling an Estate Updated July 31, 2026. Quick answer: under intestacy, stepchildren inherit nothing in nearly every state — no matter how long they were raised, no matter that everyone called them family. The statutes distribute to blood and adopted relatives; “step” is not a legal category of heir. The exceptions are narrow

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