Saving the Family Cottage: A Guide to Succession Planning for Your Cottage, Cabin, Camp or Vacation Home

A Very Useful Guide (2010-08-02) : 5/5
Saving the Family Cottage is a very useful and informative guide to "Succession Planning" for your favorite vacation home. The author spends several chapters reviewing possible forms of ownership and concludes that one (an LLC) is by far the best. The balance of the book offers expert advice on the practical issues of sharing a home into the future.

A quick read which met my expectations perfectly.

HDS Aug. 2010
Well Written (2010-02-27) : 5/5
Well written book. Author discusses several real world situations, and describes outcomes of proper vacation home death planning, and consequences of non-planning or avoidance. You do not have to be an attorney, financial planner, or accounant to read this book. It is a benefit for anyone who owns a vacation property.

Book does not describe state specific strategies, but is more of a general planning and idea guide.
helpful book (2009-11-30) : 5/5
Saving the Family Cottage has been extremely helpful to our family. Two sets of aging sisters and their husbands owned the cabin and we needed to pass it on to the next generation. This book explained exactly how to proceed.
Eminently Practical (2009-11-24) : 5/5
The audience for this book is (sort of obvious) a person or a family with a second home that has become a financial burden. Like most of these NOLO books, this is a practical piece of work with lots of information about estate planning, real estate law, and tax planning. It assumes that you aren't an idiot, but that you'll eventually need professional resources to secure the future of the "family cottage."

Cottage? Sounds so quaint. Who still really uses that word?

It seems to me as if this book fully accomplishes its goals. The prose here isn't brilliant, but it gets the job done.

Some of the practical advice that I found useful included: the importance of having a firm plan in place (not simply moving along from quarter-to-quarter, hoping that things stay in the black!) the ramifications of making the home an LLC; strategies for renting; planning to minimize federal tax liabilities.

I'm sure a lot of this information is available in various estate planning and wealth management books, but I don't have time to pour through them. Thus, I REALLY appreciated the compartmentalization here.
Just what I needed (2009-10-14) : 4/5
Having two different camps owned by multiple family members in my immediate family, this book was very informative of some of the pros and cons of different ways of managing and transitioning ownership.

One of my goals for 2010 is to put into action a more formal plan for the ownership of these camps. Some of the issues (scheduling, renting, etc) have not been issues for us to date, but could be down the road.

What could sound like a very dry topic reads VERY easily, of course if it's something that you have or will have to deal with.