Arizona Estate Planning

Arizona Estate planning is the process of arranging your affairs to protect your assets during life, direct your medical care during possible incapacitation, and efficiently direct the distribution of your assets at death.

Douglas K Cook is an Arizona estate planning lawyer with over 40 years of experience as a practicing attorney. Although Douglas K Cook's office is located in Mesa, Arizona, he represents clients throughout the Phoenix, Arizona Metropolitan area including the following east valley cities: Scottsdale, Paradise Valley, Tempe, Chandler, & Gilbert.

Arizona life insurance beneficiaries who are deemed to have “insurable interests” in the lives of another, other than those effecting the insurance or their legal representatives, are “entitled to [life insurance] proceeds against the creditors and representatives of the person effecting the insurance.

A qualified personal residence trust, or QPRT, can reduce the federal estate tax associated with transferring property to heirs, reduce the federal gift tax associated with such transfer, and, provide asset protection.

Arizona living wills and health care powers of attorney are legal documents that allow people to articulate their wishes. Although these two directives may seem mutually exclusive, they can actually work in tandem.

An Arizona living trust is an arrangement in which a person, called a settlor, transfers his/her assets to a revocable trust for the benefit of others upon the settlor's death. Living trusts are commonly used as an alternative to wills in order to direct the distribution of a person's assets after his/her death and to avoid probate. In contrast, an Arizona testamentary trust is created by a decedent's will upon his/her death. Unlike living trusts, testamentary trusts are not created to avoid probate.

An Arizona living trust is a means of structuring the transfer of a decedent's assets upon his/her death in a manner that aims to avoid probate completely or minimize the size and complexity of a particular probate.

On occasion, a decedent may desire to permit another to use real property after the death of the decedent but only for as long as the other person is alive, thereby restricting the other person (life tenant) from directing the transfer of the property at the life tenant's death. Although there are a number of different methods to create a lifetime interest in real property at a person's death, two of the simplest and most flexible methods are beneficiary deeds and trusts.

Minority discounts are a generally accepted practice used in determining the fair market value of non-controlling, minority interests in corporations. Such discounts are also often deemed valid by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) when calculating the federal estate and/or federal gift taxes that are associated with interfamilial transfers of interests within a corporation.

Over the last several decades it has become routine practice to provide in a married couple’s estate plan for the division of the estate of the first spouse to die into two portions which are then to be held in two separate trusts. One portion is the amount that is exempt from federal estate tax (the “exclusion amount”) and the other is the excess, if any, for which the marital deduction is claimed. The result is no estate tax on the death of the first spouse, regardless of the size of the estate. Furthermore, because the exclusion amount is kept separate from the survivor’s estate it is not taxed when the survivor dies.

Community property law presumes that all property acquired during marriage, except by gift or inheritance, is owned equally by each spouse.