Alamo, GA Estate Planning Law Firms & Lawyers

Rather than give your home to your kids, you may want to consider having an irrevocable trust drafted on your behalf and place your home into the trust. Your children can be made to be the trustees of the trust. While they will be in charge of the house, you may retain certain right to the home. Also, if the receive the house after you pass from the trust, they will likely not have to pay any taxes when they sell the house. However if you give them the house, they ma have to pay a capital gains tax on any profit made from the sale of the house. The profit from the sale will be determined by home much the home sold for less how much you paid for it when you originally bought it. Talk to a qualified attorney on how an irrevocable trust can help your situation.

If you are named as the POD beneficiary on your father's bank account, that account became yours at his death and did not become part of his estate. It's not even your responsibility to use it to pay estate related expenses or expenses related to his death: it's your money, not his. His probate estate assets are supposed to be used to pay for expenses relating to his death, his debts, and similar items. If your father was receiving nursing home Medicaid benefits before his death, there may be some ability for the state to come after the funds from the POD account, under an estate recovery program, because in Georgia the concept of estate recovery is being applied to assets other than strictly probate estate assets. And if he had income tax or other tax liens, then you may have some potential liability to turn over the assets to the tax department. But in general, as stated above, assets from a POD account which came to you under the POD designation are yours, and are not subject to paying estate debts or expenses.