Category: Estate Planning & Probate

Guardianship and conservatorship in Arizona sound interchangeable, but a court treats them as two separate appointments. They answer two separate questions. Guardianship addresses a person’s body and daily care. Conservatorship addresses their money and property. A family can need one without the other. Understanding which one actually fits the situation matters before anyone files a…

A power of attorney Arizona resident signs for their finances does not let that same agent make a single medical decision. Arizona treats financial authority and health care authority as two completely separate legal instruments. Two different statutes govern them, and signing one does nothing for the other. That split trips up a lot of…

Intestate succession Arizona law surprises a lot of surviving spouses, because most people assume a spouse automatically inherits everything. That’s only true in some cases. Under A.R.S. § 14-2102, whether a spouse gets the whole estate or only a slice of it depends on one specific fact: whether the deceased person had children from a…

The Arizona probate process doesn’t start automatically the moment someone dies. It starts when someone files an application with the court. Until that happens, no one has legal authority to touch the deceased person’s bank accounts, sell their house, or close out their affairs. That single fact surprises a lot of families. They assume probate…

A will and a trust can distribute the exact same property to the exact same people. Yet they can produce completely different outcomes for your family. The difference isn’t what each document says. It’s what happens after you die. A will has to go through Arizona’s probate court before anything gets distributed. A properly funded…