4 Reasons to Contest a Will

Despite what you see on TV, there are only four limited grounds on which to contest a will:

• The will wasn't signed in accordance with state law. If a will fails to meet the very stringent execution standards, then it won't be deemed to be a will. If it's not a will, it can't transfer your property at death. This has led to many people believing that they have a perfectly valid estate plan-but instead leaving their heirs in for an unpleasant surprise because the will wasn't executed properly. 
  
  
• Lack of testamentary capacity. This invalidates a will on the grounds that the person executing the will was incompetent to do so at the time they did it. You most often see this issue raised regarding an older person who modifies their will and removes some people who were beneficiaries under a prior will. The fact of the matter is that the level of capacity required to execute a will isn't very high; it's actually lower than the level of capacity needed to execute a contract. In essence, in order to be competent to execute a will, a person needs to know (1) the nature and value of their assets, (2) who would receive their assets if they didn't have a will, and (3) the legal effect of signing the will. Someone would have a long road ahead of them to prove you didn't have the capacity to execute your will. It's hard to come by historic evidence of lack of capacity. 
  
  
• Undue influence. This is the biggie when it comes to will contests. The issue is that if a person is in a confidential relationship with you, then the person might be able to cause you such duress about your will that you lose your independence of thought process. What if you rely on one of your daughters to cook and clean for you, and she hints that unless she gets the house, she won't be able to continue helping you? Or, what if a hired caregiver threatens to withhold your medication unless you change your will to benefit them? Or, perhaps your nephew helpfully drives you to his attorney to create a new will, which just happens to leave everything to him. When a will has unequal distributions, or distributions to non-family members, a court is reasonably concerned that the will was created out of fear that the favored beneficiary would cease caring for or even harm the person making out the will. Nine months before you died, were you threatened into changing your will to name your caregiver as the primary beneficiary? Or has your caregiver helped you for eight years, you don't see your relatives, and you just got around to making out your will nine months before you died? 
  
  
• Fraud. You give a person a contract to sign, and it turns out someone slipped a will into the document and the person didn't know they were signing a will. The will is invalid because it clearly isn't an expression of the person's intent. Another fraudulent situation is where somebody slips pages into the middle of the will. This is why best practices dictate that the person making out a will or revocable trust initial each and every page.
  

Reputation Repair & Management

Predictions made decades ago about the world becoming a global village have come true. Now more than ever before our reputations are our most valuable asset. Prospective employers, business associates and potential mates search each other online to learn more; usually soon after the first contact.

First go to a computer, preferably not your own computer, and put your name into Google, then Bing, then Yahoo search engines. You may want to use various versions of your name, a maiden name, or with and without your middle initial. Also if you are known by a nickname or shortened version of your name, plug those in as well. You can go as deep as you like on each of these search engines, I recommend that you search up to page three or four. 

What do you find? Good, bad, ugly? If a search comes up showing you dancing on the bar at your last party, you've got some work to do. Likewise, if you have ever been arrested, your face - the worst picture taken on the worst day of your life - your mugshot may appear on the very first page of Google. 

The permanence of the web creates a major branding challenge: once negative information is out there, it's difficult to remove. If you've created the questionable content you can delete it and -- eventually -- it will be removed from the caches of Google and other search engines If you don't control the content, the first thing to do is ask the person who does control the content to remove it. 

Create your own content and drive the bad stuff down in search engine rankings. No one, usually not even your worst enemy will bother to search past the first several pages on any of the search engines; most readers will stick to the first page or two. Creating a robust social media and online presence guarantees that the top results will be the ones you want people to see. Studies have shown that video, in particular, is prized by Google and will rank highly, so you might want to consider a video blog. Traditional blogs, because their content is updated frequently, are also search-engine-friendly. Creating profiles on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter also helps. 

There are certain reputation repair and management tasks that you can easily do yourself; and tasks that you may need help with. The basic principle is to bury negative information by providing positive information to take its place. Take a close look at the pages returned in a search. Would you want your grandmother or your nine year old daughter to see it? If the picture of you dancing on the bar is on your own Facebook page, take it down, or tighten your privacy settings. Follow suit with Twitter if you need to. If you don't have a Twitter account, create one to tweet positively and intelligently. Your Linkedin account is one of the vital parts of creating your positive online presence. You are creating your own personal brand, make sure the information that you share with the world positively reflects who you are. Making comments on popular blogs with well considered responses may also help build your online reputation. 

If information online is untrue and defamatory you may be able to have it taken down. Forcing a company to remove defamatory information may not be easy, but it is possible. Possibly you can file suit; contact the hosting company and request that the information be removed; or as we suggest -- bury negative information by piling positive information on top.

There are companies that specialize in reputation repair and management. Some of them do all the work for you, others do some of it; still others provide you the tools to repair and manage your reputation yourself. I recommend a company called Brand Yourself because I have had first hand experience with it, and know that it works. Click here or click the logo and try it yourself.

A pro se litigant, first recommended Brand Yourself to me. He had a criminal charge which had been dismissed, but it continued to haunt him. He is a chef in a competitive market, and was not being offered positions for which he was well qualified because of the negative information gleaned from the pre-employment pre-interview internet search. We can say that with confidence, because after he went through the Brand Yourself process, he began receiving the type of job offers he deserves.

In a second example, someone I know managed to bury two mug shots, by using the services provided in Brand Yourself. We know it works. Brand Yourself offers a free service, which works just fine, but you have to patient. You can upgrade to their paid service, and see your online reputation improve faster. Either way, you receive an alert every time anything changes when your name is searched. 

 

American Dream to American Nightmare

Homeowners facing foreclosure face a gamut of challenges and emotions. Many cannot afford an attorney or they would not be in foreclosure in the first place. And, oh so many, were told when they first bought or refinanced back during the boom years -- don't worry you can re-fi in two years and get out from under that adjustable rate mortgage (ARM) - get out from under that ARM that is tied to the mysterious LIBOR which was manipulated anyway and which caps the adjustable rate at some outrageous rate as much as 15%. People bought the lie and bought the line. After all, property values were going up and up, why couldn't they re-fi in a couple of years, cash out the old equity and get a fixed rate. Oops there go the goal posts. Now way way over there. This strategy worked for a while, as all good Ponzi schemes do. The homeowners who jumped on fast, and then jumped off the merry go round, made some money. It's the people who didn't jump off fast enough that got run over, and it's still happening. Lots of homeowner roadkill.

Homeowners in foreclosure feel shame. Shame that they are unable to pay their mortgage, and shame that they fell for it. Most scams are under reported because the victims are ashamed. They berate themselves that they should have known better.

The Ponzi Scheme

If current events have proven anything, it’s that there is no more potentially profitable con game than the Ponzi scheme. The trick dates back hundreds of years, but it was popularized by Charles Ponzi, an Italian immigrant to the U.S. who swindled investors out of millions in the early 1900s before being arrested. The modern Ponzi scheme is a form of investment fraud in which a fake or corrupt stockbroker uses the money of his new investors to pay the imaginary returns of his old ones. Initial investments with the fake broker might yield enormous returns for the people being conned, but in reality their money has not been invested in anything–the con man has simply been putting it all into a bank account. Any time someone wants to withdraw money, or if he has to pay the returns of his old investors, the con man simply uses the money he’s gotten from new investors to do it. Nothing is actually being invested, won, or lost in the market. The con man is simply giving that impression so that people keep handing over more and more cash. Because it can only grow so far, any Ponzi scheme is destined to eventually collapse under its own weight, so the con man usually pulls a disappearing act after collecting enough money, leaving the investors with nothing but the fake returns they received to keep them involved in the swindle. Undoubtedly the most famous recent example involved Bernard Madoff, a New York financier who engineered a Ponzi scheme estimated to be in the neighborhood of $65 billion. Madoff was eventually caught and sentenced to 150 years in prison, but not before pulling of what is essentially the biggest con game of all time.

Sound Familiar?

Maybe not yet, stay with me. The picture becomes more clear the more you learn about this huge scam being perpetrated by the too big to fail banks. You go to buy a house. Like most Americans, you expect to put money down and get a mortgage on the house. That's how it has always been done. When you go to the closing table you sign the mountain of documents that are briefly explained, but there is no time to read the documents. And no time to absorb or question the brief explanation. So you sign. Somewhere in that mountain of paperwork, sign sign signing, is the agreement and acknowledgment that this lender may sell and transfer the debt to another entity, shall I say lender? Problem is, it isn't really a lender, it is a trust, a pooling service agreement. At the time, you don't really care, because all you're trying to do is close on this house and take possession. Even if some of the paperwork doesn't seem quite right or you don't understand it, you let it go. We all did. You think, if you question it at all, is that you have protections. There are laws that protect home buyers from fraud. The mortgage industry must have rules and standards to protect buyers. This is America.

You live your life. A month or more after buying you get a letter stating that the original lender transferred the debt or the servicing to another company. The letter includes assurances that the terms of your debt remain the same. You continue to pay the same monthly amount, the only difference is that you send your payments to a new address. Life goes on.

And life has a way of bringing on life events. Maybe you get sick. Maybe your spouse gets sick. Maybe your spouse dies. Maybe you lose your job. Maybe this country experiences the worst economic down turn since the Great Depression. And then, your ARM resets.

What you didn't know, behind the scenes, is that when your original "lender" transferred their interest in your property to another entity, your debt morphed into an Asset Backed Security, a bond, a security theoretically to be sold on Wall Street.

The lenders and the servicers were busy selling these securitized debt instruments all over the world. They gleefully sold the paper -- over and over. And that debt, in many cases, was never actually placed in any trust or pooling service agreement. They sold these as more like a potential asset, a position, and investors bought. The higher the risk the more the return. As long as new "mortgages" were created money was flowing. The investors were paid. Paid over and over handsomely. But when the financial crisis hit the world, sometime around 2008, and homeowners began defaulting on their mortgages, and it became clear that the asset backed securities were based on loans that had been misrepresented and the asset backed securities that had supposedly been put into trusts were never transferred correctly and homeowners ARMs reset - the s**t hit the fan.

The bottom tier of the Ponzi scheme failed. The house of cards tumbled.

And this just in:

Hey friend,

INCREDIBLE: The Justice Department has evidence JP Morgan Chase committed major banking fraud - but instead of filing criminal charges, they're *negotiating* with them to settle for a small fraction of the damage they did.

Tell the Department of Justice that negotiating with criminals on their own punishment is unacceptable. America is tired of Chase paying fines. We need Chase doing Time:

http://other98.com/dont-negotiate-with-chase-prosecute-them

Thank you for doing the right thing.