§ 6.1 Reference
The Article Archive
This domain carried a long-running archive of short notes on Texas estate planning, inheritance, long-term care and probate. The notes themselves are gone; the subjects they covered are set out here, mapped to the reference pages that now treat each one properly.
The archive ran across five broad categories, and anyone arriving from an old link to a dated post will find the relevant material below. Where a legacy address is followed today, it resolves here.
Estate planning
The largest category by some distance. Recurring subjects included why estate planning matters for people of ordinary means rather than only the wealthy; how trustee discretion should be framed in a document; portability elections; planning for extended and blended families; the treatment of non-citizen spouses; digital assets and the problem of accounts nobody can reach; and the perennial question of where a will ends and a trust begins.
All of it now sits under estate planning, which covers the core documents, with dedicated pages on living trusts, irrevocable trusts, IRA inheritance trusts, dynasty and grandchildren's trusts, charitable giving and asset protection.
Long-term care planning
Notes in this category dealt with the coordination that long-term care planning demands; what a dementia diagnosis means for the planning timetable; whether long-term care insurance is worth its premium and what waiting costs; how planning avoids the spend-down of a lifetime's savings; and why the subject is not only one for the very old — several notes made the case that people in their thirties and forties should understand it, generally because they are the ones who end up managing it for a parent.
These subjects are covered on Medicaid and elder law, with detail on eligibility, crisis planning, the common mistakes, qualified income trusts and estate recovery.
Estate administration
Notes on what an executor is actually required to do, how probate can go badly when a will is unclear, whether a payable-on-death account has to be probated at all, and what happens when an estate is administered without a will. Several dealt with disputes — including the recurring problem of two wills of uncertain sequence.
Covered now at probate and estate administration.
Inheritances
A category concerned less with law than with judgement: what heirs actually do with an inheritance, how families divide property without dividing themselves, protecting an inheritance from a beneficiary's creditors or a future divorce, and the tax consequences that surprise people — including the basis rules that make a lifetime gift so often worse than a bequest.
The relevant law is on the estate planning and trusts pages; the treatment of an inheritance received by a person with a disability is on the special needs planning page, where getting it wrong has the sharpest consequences.
Probate litigation
The smallest category: will contests, disputes over trustee and executor conduct, and the arguments that arise when family members disagree about what a document was meant to say. The reference does not cover contested proceedings in detail, because litigation is fact-specific to a degree a general reference cannot usefully address. The probate page explains where dependent administration becomes necessary, and the resources page lists the organisations that can help someone find representation.
Why the notes are not reproduced
They were written for a particular audience in a particular decade, and much of what they described has since changed — the SECURE Act rewrote inherited retirement accounts in 2019, the VA introduced a net worth limit and a look-back in 2018, and Texas revised its perpetuities rule in 2021. Reproducing dated commentary on a subject where the rules have moved would be worse than saying plainly that the archive is closed and pointing to material written against the current law.