Exceptional solutions. Your needs are as unique as you.

Search
Close this search box.

Blog

OSullivan-Estate-Lawyers-LLP-logo

Celebrating

our 10th year
blog anniversary

Category: Estate Planning

Multiple Taxation on Death: The Taxpayer’s Nightmare

With increasing globalization of people and their assets, a growing and often hidden threat is multiple taxation on death. Different countries tax in different ways on death, and when those laws collide, the same assets can be exposed to double and even triple tax or more. Some countries tax the

Read More »

No Estate Planner is an Island

A well drafted will is not worth the (stack of) paper it is written on if it fails to achieve the client’s objectives. Those objectives are often defeated where an estate plan is not properly designed, implemented, or maintained. Under the traditional approach to estate planning, the lawyer typically designs

Read More »

Special Needs Planning: Knowledge is Power

As parents, we worry about our children: a truism that becomes even more true, and often extends to siblings, grandparents, aunts and uncles, when a child has special needs. We worry about what will happen to the special-needs individual, how they will care for themself and be cared for, and

Read More »

Start the New Year off on the Right Foot

As of today, according to the Gregorian calendar, we are just over one month away from ringing in the New Year. If you are already contemplating your New Year’s resolution, we thought we would help out in this blog post by providing you with a shortlist of “thinking points” for

Read More »

Owning a Home Jointly with a Child – More Trouble than it’s Worth?

In Ontario, on an application for a Certificate of Appointment, the applicant must pay Ontario Estate Administration Tax (also known as “probate tax”). Probate tax is levied at an approximate rate of 1.5% on the gross value of the estate. Assets passing outside of an estate, such as jointly-owned assets,

Read More »

Ethos for an Aging Society

It is quite remarkable to think that notwithstanding our increasingly aging demographic,1 the recognition of the rights of older persons as a distinct group has been largely absent in the field of human rights. Only recently the rights of older persons as a distinct group have begun to emerge and

Read More »

For Better or For Worse… Especially If You Move

There are many things that we think about and plan for when we move–furniture, movers, schools, utilities… I could go on and on. There are even more things that we plan for when we move to another jurisdiction-language, taxes, visas, driving laws… and so it goes. But one thing you

Read More »

The Many and Varied Uses of Letters of Wishes in Your Estate Plan

Estate planning documents (such as a will, power of attorney for property, power of attorney for personal care, Henson-type trust and/or inter vivos trust) are the legal framework of an estate plan–the “apparatus”–which can seem to be a tricky network of legal rules, directions, and often unavoidably, a lot of

Read More »

The Two Certainties: Death and (Foreign) Taxes

A failure to take into account taxes on death can often defeat an estate plan. It can result in a smaller estate being available for distribution and it can also result in some beneficiaries bearing a disproportionate amount of the estate’s tax burden. While most estate plans take into account

Read More »