Long pieces, written slowly, with the documents attached.
Photograph Cushlaun · CC BY-SA 4.0
Essays
How the word estate moved from rank to land to what a person leaves, how death taxes broke up English estates, and how Chatsworth, Highclere, Biltmore, Graceland, the Michael Jackson estate and the Grosvenor estate are held today.
Four open questions, followed as far as the sources go: what money’s jobs are, where a bank’s money comes from, who first wrote down “money is energy,” and what the evidence says about wealth passed between generations.
In 1994, two finance professors counted the last digit of Nasdaq stock quotes and found half the possible prices missing. What happened next -- an overnight collapse, a billion-dollar settlement, and the death of the eighth -- is the story of who keeps the spread.
Losing a hundred dollars hurts about twice as much as gaining a hundred dollars feels good. That asymmetry, and a shortlist of cousins like it, explains more about investor behavior than any spreadsheet does. The errors are systematic, predictable, and preventable -- if you know what to watch for.
Reference Guides
Wills, revocable trusts, and irrevocable trusts -- the mechanics, the tax treatment, and where each one breaks down. Probate, funding, ILITs, GRATs, QPRTs, SLATs, IDGTs, a full comparison table and glossary, and a ten-question knowledge check.
