Greetings from Downtown Seattle!

It is a nice, partly-sunny late-fall Seattle morning, and the weekend is looking pretty decent. I'm hoping that if the winds stay calm and the skies relatively dry, I can get one last weekend on the water in my 17' 1976 Bayliner Mutiny. My sister and I bought it off of my grandmother late this summer after my step-grandfather passed away in June. We've been thrilled to keep one of his prized possessions in the family, and I only hope that we are as good caretakers as he was of this 70s-bowling-alley-blue beauty.

As an estate planning and probate attorney, I've probably spent as much time on family probate matters as I have on anyone else's. I reckon that some would find this morbid or depressing. It is certainly emotional, surveying the life of someone I know well, and whose own life played a role in molding my own. That said, I am thrilled to be able to help my family, and the families of my clients, at this most profound of all moments.

Through this, I've been struck by the loose ends that are left untied, the bad feelings unaddressed, and all the little "i"s undotted and "t"s uncrossed. That's probably why I feel compelled to blog here: I want YOU to know the whys and hows of estate planning.

Yes, I get paid to draft estate plans, so in the interest of full-disclosure, I have a vested interest in you wanting to get your affairs in order. But that's not my goal here. Rather, I want to talk to you about the experiences I see my clients facing every day (in general terms of course - attorney-client privilege is extremely important to me!), the tough decisions they have to make, and the intended and unintended results of those decisions.

I supppose I should take a moment to define estate planning for those that don't know what it is. It's pretty straightforward if you break it down by its elements: Your "estate" is a broad description of all the property you own: furniture, collectibles, vehicles (and vessels!), real estate, bank accounts, stocks and bonds, and even intangible and inchoate (yet-to-be-formed) rights and interests that have real value. The "planning" portion is deciding how you want to manage that property while you are alive, and where and how it passes to your heirs and/or other beneficiaries when you die. This may also be referred to as asset protection, generational planning, etc.

The most simple of my estate plans consist of a will and disposition of remains, powers of attorney for health care and financial decisions, and a health care directive, which is also known as a "living will" or "directive to physicians". More complex estate plans include living (a.k.a. inter-vivos) trusts (a trust created during your life), testamentary trusts (a trust created upon your death), pre-nuptial or domestic partnership agreements, and community property agreements. The most complex estate plans will include many or all of these aforementioned planning vehicles, as well as tax-planning trusts (of both the inter-vivos and testamentary nature), and family companies. Of course, you can see a list of the kind of work I typically do on estate plans on my firm's web site at www.spenceranderson.com/estate-planning.htm.

Sorry, I know that's a lot of information, but it is a good basis to help you understand just what it is that I do, and what it is that I am going to talk about here. Yes, of course, I will try to pepper this with some other fun tidbits of information, and I suspect that you will see me venture outside of the estate planning arena just a little when I talk about emerging property rights issues, family law, and small business matters, all of which tie back to my main practice area of estate planning and probate.

So there it is, my introduction. I hope you find this blog occasionally helpful and more occasionally interesting. I invite you to email with questions, thoughts, feedback, etc. Respectful disagreement is absolutely fine, just be nice!

Thanks for reading, and I'll post more soon.