Your Probate Vocabulary Cheat Sheet

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After a person dies, someone has to do things with that dead person’s remaining assets.  And to do those things, that someone has to go to the Probate Court and be appointed the legal representative for the dead person.  If you are that “someone,” when you start looking into what has to be done, you’ll see that Probate has a language of its own – which can be overwhelming.  So while lots of Probate work can be done without a lawyer, it is much more difficult if you don’t know what the terms mean.

This “Probate Vocabulary Cheat Sheet” spells out some frequently used terms that come up during Probate and what they mean: Read more

Pink, Grey, The Queen of Hearts, and Ted Williams

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Surgeons“Off with her head!” cried the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland. Off with his head is what Ted Williams’ son did to him. The ultimate baseball player’s head and his body live in separate cryogenic tanks in Arizona, ever since he died in 2002.

There was some question as to whether the slugger wanted to be frozen for the future. He called for his lawyer several times before his death, according to a recently-published biography[1].

His children made sure the meeting never happened. His son was particularly enamored with all the publicity of cryogenics. And the company which did the freezing-draining-antifreezing (you had to ask, right?) just loved the idea of having such a celebrity in their tanks.

Shades of Woody Allen’s movie Sleeper, in which the fictional hero is cryogenically frozen for 200 years. The movie’s hero was fictional; Ted Williams was very real.

Now there’s no moral lesson to be drawn from this. There are, however, two practical ones. Read more