How inheritance law has failed to recognize the modern family.

Bestselling author and estate-planning expert Martin Shenkman helps you INHERIT MORE Elderly parents and benefactors need your help, and helping them can also preserve the largest financial windfall of your life-an inheritance. Finally, there's a book that answers all your questions. Inherit More is the straightforward, practical guide to keeping more of what's rightfully yours. It also helps you broach a difficult subject with your loved ones. It provides sensitive advice on talking to parents and practical guidance for dealing with family, financial, and other issues critical to every benefactor and critical to preserving your inheritance. Caring children of any age will find proven, world-class counsel on dealing with every major inheritance problem, including: * Honoring your parents' requests and making them comfortable addressing a plan * Resolving and avoiding issues between heirs * Finding the right insurance to safeguard your parents and their assets * Helping your parents invest properly * How your parents can distribute jewelry without the children fighting * Helping an elderly or ill parent locate missing assets * Dealing with lawyers Estate-planning expert and tax accountant Martin Shenkman also offers six simple steps you can take now to help your parents and safeguard your inheritance for the future. Dealing with issues of inheritance can be a difficult and emotional experience. That's why Inherit More offers the thoughtful, proven advice to help you get through tough times with as little distress as possible.

With the baby boom generation on the cusp of retirement, life expectancies on the rise, and the nation’s cultural makeup in flux, the United States is faced with social and policy quandaries that demand attention. How are elders to balance the competing claims of helping family members during their lifetime, saving for old age, and planning estates? What roles should the state, family, and individuals play in supporting people during later life? Are new familial gift-giving trends sustainable, and, if so, what effects might they have on future generations? Inheritance in Contemporary America tackles the complex legal, policy, and emotional issues that surround bequests and inheritances in an era of increasing longevity, broadening ethnicity, and unraveling social safety nets. Through empirical analyses, case studies, interviews, and anecdotes, Jacqueline L. Angel explains the historical nature of familial giving and how it is changing as the nation’s demographics shift. She explores the legal, personal, and policy complexities involved in passing wealth down through generations and provides a cross-disciplinary context for exploring the indelible effects that newly unfolding inheritance practices will have on various societal cohorts and the nation in general. From nuclear and extended families to the state and nongovernmental bodies, Angel’s engaging study explores how attitudes toward giving are evolving and confronts in stark terms the legacy that these shifts in attitude will leave. This book will be a vital tool for scholars and practitioners in gerontology, sociology, psychology, anthropology, economics, political science, and public policy.