Staten Island Planning for the House, the Pension and the Family That Grew in Two Parts

A common strategy is an irrevocable Medicaid asset protection trust, which can shield the home after New York's look-back period while letting you continue to live there. A life estate is another option in some cases. Because each family's age, health, and finances differ, we review your circumstances before recommending the right protection under New York law.

Probate and administration for those who lived on Staten Island are filed with the Richmond County Surrogate's Court at 18 Richmond Terrace in St. George. You will need the original will, a certified death certificate, and a petition naming the distributees. Our Grasmere office helps executors and administrators prepare and file these documents accurately.

New York's EPTL intestacy rules govern when there is no will. A surviving spouse and children share the estate under a statutory formula, and a court-appointed administrator must handle the assets first. This may not match your wishes, and it can delay passing your Staten Island home to your family. A will or trust gives you control over the outcome.

No. A pension pays according to the option he elected at retirement and the beneficiary form on file with the retirement system, and a will does not change either. A single-life option ends at death; a joint-and-survivor option continues, at a reduced rate, to the person named. There is often a separate death benefit with its own form. We ask to see both, because they are filled in years apart and are frequently inconsistent.

It can, in ways families do not expect. Grant-funded elevation and rebuild programmes came with recorded covenants and conditions, and some properties carry restrictions on transfer, occupancy or resale for a period of years. Flood insurance also does not simply follow the family: a policy has to be assigned or rewritten, and a lapse between a death and a transfer can leave a rebuilt house uninsured. Read the recorded documents before assuming the house passes cleanly.

Outright gifts to a spouse rely on their future choices; a trust does not. A common structure gives the surviving spouse income and the right to live in the house for life, with the remainder passing to the children of the first marriage. It removes the pressure that produces most of the litigation we see between stepchildren and a second spouse, and it is far cheaper than the fight it prevents.

That depends on what was done and when. A transfer within five years of applying for nursing-home Medicaid creates a penalty period, and after a death the state may seek recovery from the estate for what it paid. Planning several years ahead has real options — an irrevocable trust among them; planning during a hospital discharge has very few. The one thing that never works is doing nothing and hoping the house is overlooked.

At the Richmond County Surrogate's Court on Richmond Terrace in St. George. An uncontested estate with a clear will, a cooperative family and an ordinary house commonly runs several months. What lengthens it here is usually not the court: it is a property that must be appraised or sold, a beneficiary who cannot be located, or a dispute between children of different marriages.

It transferred something, but perhaps not what he intended. Joint ownership passes the property to you at his death without probate, and it also exposed the house to your creditors and to a divorce from the day it was signed, gave up part of the step-up in basis, and started a Medicaid clock. Adding a child to a deed is the most common do-it-yourself plan on this island and the one we most often have to work around.

Often not for those assets — jointly held property and accounts with named beneficiaries pass outside the estate. But most families have something left over: a car, a bank account in one name, a refund cheque, a claim nobody knew about. A small-estate voluntary administration handles many of these without a full proceeding, provided no real property stood in the decedent's sole name.