Inheritance Attorney
Family members, heirs, or beneficiaries should consult an experienced Texas inheritance lawyer to know understand their rights under the law. Some of the things an inheritance lawyer can help you with are:
- Partition actions
- Probate collection
- Partition actions
- Issues around guardianship
- Determination of heirs
- Breach of fiduciary duty cases
- Death benefit collections
- Unclaimed property
- Contested probate lawsuits and other inheritance issues
Inheriting Wealth
Every year more than $200 billion is passed down through inheritance to beneficiaries in the United States. Parents often pass wealth or obligations to their children and the wealth can be land, jewelry, stocks, businesses, and more. They do this through wills that have to be filed with a probate court which determines proper heirs and beneficiaries. In the absence of a will the closest relatives of the decedent inherit that wealth in an order set out in Texas law. If the property passed to you is significant, you will need an inheritance lawyer in Texas to guide you through the process. A lawyer may also be necessary if a member of the family member is threatening to sue over the estate.
Why You Need An Inheritance Lawyer
An experienced Texas inheritance lawyer can make the process of collecting and gathering of wealth easier for the family, heirs, and beneficiaries that hire the lawyer. Your lawyer can guide you through the probate process, deal with insurance and oil companies, work with real estate agents, and work through banks and title companies.
In fact, your inheritance lawyer can handle all these issues which gives you time to settle other less complicated affairs of the deceased. Some people worry that hiring a lawyer to handle these issues would be costly, but actually there are many flexible ways to pay your inheritance lawyer. For example, some lawyers allow you to pay them from the assets that the lawyer successfully collects or transfers to the beneficiary, heir or family.
What You Need To Know About Unclaimed Wealth
A significant number of Texans do not know that they have unclaimed wealth that they can collect at any time with the right papers. Some of the unclaimed wealth in Texas includes houses, stocks, safety deposit boxes, bank accounts, and more. While it is possible for the wealth to remain unclaimed because someone forgot about it, most of the times unclaimed wealth is wealth that belongs to a family member that died suddenly or got incapacitated unexpectedly.
Probate And Non-Probate Assets
Not all the assets of the decedent will have to go through the probate process. Assets that bypass the courts process (probate process) include property held in joint tenancy, vehicles and boats held in joint names, retirement accounts that name a beneficiary other than the decedent, and more. Non-probate assets are passed to the designated beneficiaries immediately after the death of the decedent.
On the other hand, probate assets have to go through probate for the proper heirs and beneficiaries to be identified. They are assets a decedent owned in their sole name such as bank accounts, jewelry, furniture, life insurance policy, and real property titled solely in the decedent’s name.