Articles Posted in Estate Planning

By Kelly M. Neumann, a Michigan estate planning attorney and Principal Attorney at Neumann Law Group. Last updated October 13, 2026. Michigan’s default rules for an estate were written with a first marriage in mind, and they change their arithmetic the moment a family includes children who belong to only one spouse. The changes are…

By Kelly M. Neumann, a Michigan estate planning attorney and Principal Attorney at Neumann Law Group. Last updated October 11, 2026. Families put a Northern Michigan cottage into a trust or a limited liability company to share it across a generation without a partition suit. The structure solves the ownership problem well. It also moves…

By Kelly M. Neumann, a Michigan estate planning attorney and Principal Attorney at Neumann Law Group. Last updated September 23, 2026. Lists of estate planning mistakes tend to be lists of things that are unwise. The ones that actually cost Northern Michigan families money are narrower than that, because each corresponds to a specific sentence…

By Kelly M. Neumann, a Michigan estate planning attorney and Principal Attorney at Neumann Law Group. Last updated September 17, 2026. The claim made for a Lady Bird deed is that it keeps a home out of probate, off the Medicaid ledger, and under the property tax cap all at once. Each of those results…

By Kelly M. Neumann, a Michigan estate planning attorney and Principal Attorney at Neumann Law Group. Last updated September 15, 2026. Most writing about protecting assets from Medicaid concerns what a family does in advance. Less is written about what Michigan protects after the fact, for a family that did no planning at all, and…

By Kelly M. Neumann, a Michigan estate planning attorney and Principal Attorney at Neumann Law Group. Last updated September 8, 2026. Michigan has no living will statute. The document that does that work here is the patient advocate designation, and it does it by appointing a person rather than by stating instructions, which means the…

By Kelly M. Neumann, a Michigan estate planning attorney and Principal Attorney at Neumann Law Group. Last updated July 21, 2026. Michigan caps the growth of a property’s taxable value while the same owner holds it and lifts that cap when ownership transfers. The exemption that lets a family home pass to the next generation without…

By Kelly M. Neumann, a Michigan estate planning attorney and Principal Attorney at Neumann Law Group. Last updated July 18, 2026. The question of whether a family needs a will or a trust is usually answered by describing what each does. A different way in is to look at how each is made valid, because the…