During your life, you have the privilege of planning for the future of your loved ones with estate planning. While it’s not something anyone likes thinking about, making sure your estate is fully accounted for before your death is vital to the ones you leave behind. Here are three advantages of estate planning that could get you moving to get it done.

#1: Providing for Your Family

Determining how your assets will provide for your family when you’re gone is the number one advantage of estate planning. You can ensure your money goes to your beneficiaries and no place else, such as the IRS, when it’s in writing in a legal document.

#2: Ensure Wealth Protection

You can prevent any challenges to asset distribution by having an estate plan in place. You can preserve your wealth by utilizing estate planning to create a trust with limited liability. A trust takes your name off of your assets and transfers them to the trust. This will protect your wealth, assets, and family.

#3: Protect Yourself

An estate plan isn’t just for use after you die. An estate plan will also determine your care and directives should you become ill or incapacitated. The plan will protect you and your assets if you are no longer able to make decisions for yourself.

Don’t leave your family in limbo dealing with probate, legal issues, and fighting to maintain assets and care after your passing. Plan now to take care of yourself, your estate, your wealth, and your loved ones. Contact the experienced team at McCutchen McLean, LLC, to start the estate planning process.   

Establishing paternity is vital to all parties for many reasons. If you’ve fathered a child in South Carolina, you need to know why it’s so important to prove it’s yours. Take a look at three reasons proof matters.

#1: Legal Rights

In the state of South Carolina, the father of a child born out of wedlock must establish paternity before he has any legal rights concerning the child. These rights include visitation, custody, decision-making, including medical care, education, and religion. It also affects control over the potential adoption of the child. The mother has sole discretion regarding all of these issues, leaving the biological father with no legal recourse. Without proof of paternity, the mother has every right to terminate visitation and remove the child from their father’s life.

#2: Other Rights

In addition to legal rights, establishing paternity has enormous benefits for the child, the father, and the mother. They include:

• Feeling of security for the child
• Shared information on family medical histories
• Access to inheritance, health insurance, and Social Security
• Shared parenting responsibilities
• Shared financial responsibilities
• Legal rights to parent/child visitation and relationships

#3: Paternity in South Carolina

If the parents of a child are legally married, the legal assumption is that the husband is the father at the time of birth. Even if the husband is not the biological father, they automatically have legal paternity rights. If the parents are not married, the biological father has no rights until the establishment of paternity.

Don’t give up your paternal rights. Get the help you need to establish the paternity of your child by contacting the experienced attorneys at McCutchen McLean, LLC.