These days, it is quite common to find intergenerational wealth transfer to consist of property held in a discretionary family trust whose beneficiaries may or may not have been in marital relationships at the time of the time the trusts were created. A siginifcant number of legal and financials issues…
Tag: family law act
Total 6 Posts
A Thought Experiment Recently, I had the opportunity to co-author a paper on deathbed retainers with Justin de Vries. In drafting this paper, I had the occasion to think about deathbed wills from every conceivable angle. The idea for this blog started as footnote 81: a hypothetical thought experiment on…
When I explain to people whom I’m meeting for the first time that I’m a lawyer and that among my areas of practice I draft domestic contracts, I’m often met with a response to the effect of “You mean, like, a pre-nup?” I can confirm that a “pre-nup” is, in…
In McNamee v. McNamee, the Court of Appeal reviewed the essential ingredients of a legally valid gift. The issue on appeal was whether 500 common shares in the family business, which had been transferred to Mr. McNamee Jr. constituted a gift for the purposes of s. 4(2) of the Family Law Act.
In Ontario, property that a deceased owns as a joint tenant with another person does not form part of his estate for probate tax calculation purposes. As a result, significant attention is now being paid to the use of joint ownership as an estate planning technique to reduce or avoid probate taxes for both real and personal property. However, when property is transferred into joint ownership there are many issues that should be considered other than the potential probate tax savings.
So-called “predatory” marriages may be on the upswing. When will the courts intervene?