Estate Planning

September 10, 2026

The Biggest Estate Planning Mistakes Parents Make in Illinois

Most parents who put off estate planning aren’t avoiding the hard emotional part, thinking about their own mortality. They’re avoiding it because it feels like a project for someday, something to handle once things settle down. The problem is that the mistakes parents make in this area rarely show up as a single dramatic failure. They show up quietly, in documents that were never created, or created once and never updated, and the family only discovers the gap when it’s already too late to fix it the easy way.

Here are the mistakes I see most often, and what actually protects your kids instead.

1. Not Naming a Guardian for Your Minor Children

September 1, 2026

Planning for Aging Parents Before It’s an Emergency

by Tracy A. Ries

There is a specific moment that changes everything for families caring for an aging parent, and most families do not realize they have already passed it until they need to act. It is the moment a parent loses the legal capacity to sign their own documents. Before that moment, planning is simple, calm, and entirely in your parent’s control. After it, the only path forward often runs through a courtroom.

This is the conversation most families put off, understandably. Nobody wants to sit across from a parent and talk about what happens if they can no longer make their own decisions. But the families who have this conversation early are the ones who get to avoid the version that plays out in front of a judge.

The Window Closes Quietly

August 11, 2026

What Happens to Your Digital Assets When You Die?

by Tracy A. Ries

Most estate plans were built around a picture of what a person owns that no longer matches how people actually live. A house, a car, a bank account, some furniture. But think about what’s actually sitting on your phone and in the cloud right now. Photos of your kids that only exist on your phone or in a cloud account. Years of email. A cryptocurrency wallet. A small online business or Etsy shop. Airline miles, streaming subscriptions, social media accounts your family will want to memorialize or shut down.

None of that fits neatly into a traditional will written for physical property, and if nobody has planned for it specifically, your family could find themselves locked out of things you fully intended for them to have.

Why “They’ll Just Log In” Doesn’t Work

April 1, 2025

Gene Hackman’s Death Underscores Need for Fleshed Out Estate Documents

by Tracy A. Ries

The recent deaths of Hollywood legend Gene Hackman and his wife of the past three decades, Betsy Arakawa, very close in time to one another have led to a potentially messy situation in which one of Hackman’s children might be contesting his will. The scenario highlights why it’s important that trust and estate documents account for all possible outcomes and give those you leave behind an unambiguous path to disbursing your assets.

Official reports appear to show that Arakawa died from the rare disease hantavirus and that Hackman—suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and likely not lucid enough to have called police about his wife’s death—passed away about a week later from cardiovascular disease.

Hackman’s 2005 Living Trust names Arakawa as his sole beneficiary for his $80 million estate, but since she appears to have died first, it’s not entirely clear what happens next. His daughters Leslie and Elizabeth and son Christopher are not named anywhere in the documents.

December 3, 2023

Estate Planning Insights: The Widespread Impact of Wills

by Bellas & Wachowski - Attorneys at Law

Did you know that according to recent statistics, a significant percentage of adults still don’t have a will in place? Here’s a glimpse into the current state of estate planning:

1. Widespread Gap: Surprisingly, approximately 60% of adults worldwide do not have a valid will. This means the majority of individuals are yet to formalize their wishes regarding asset distribution, guardianship, and more.

2. Age and Preparedness: Studies indicate that the younger demographic tends to procrastinate on estate planning. About 78% of millennials and 64% of Generation X don’t have a will, assuming that this is a concern for later stages of life.

December 11, 2018

Estate Planning for your Digital Assets

by George Bellas

Estate plans should account for the disbursal of all assets, lest they become marooned in probate purgatory. People are forgetting that they have digital assets that need to be accounted for.

Protecting Your Digital Assets

Digital assets like cryptocurrency, social media accounts, e-commerce and online accounts need to be cared for just as much as conventional ones, so that family members are able to account for and access them as property, wealth and assets are transferred from one generation to the next.