Question

• Rock star, Prince, passed away in early 2016. Investigate public information available on the internet and make a posting regarding the effectiveness of his estate planning.
• Does it appear that his estate was properly protected for his heirs? Why or why not?

Answer 1

When Rock star Prince was found dead, at age 57, in an elevator at his Paisley Park estate in the Minneapolis suburbs on April 21, Prince Rogers Nelson had few surviving close relatives: He had two ex-wives, no (known) surviving children, and his parents had died years before.

He has one full sister, Tyka Nelson, a singer and mother of two sons, Prince's nephews. He also has seven half-siblings through each of his parents.

As with the cause of death, it may be a while before we know. But the short answers are: It depends on whether he had a will, and it depends on Minnesota laws covering probate and inheritance.

Counting real estate and music royal rom some 30 albums and millions of records sold, Prince leaves behind an estate reported by The Los Angeles Times and BET to be as much as $300 million, although that figure has not been confirmed.

But whatever it was on the day he died, his estate has been growing by leaps and bounds ever since — exactly what happened when other major music stars died unexpectedly, such as Michael Jackson.

In the three days since Prince died, more than 579,000 albums (both digital and physical) by Prince were sold, according to Nielsen Music. By comparison, Prince sold 1,400 in the three days prior — an increase of 42,000%.

Plus, says his former manager Owen Husney, who helped Prince get his first recording contract when he was still a teen, there is indeed a cache of hundreds, even thousands, of unreleased Prince recordings that could push the value of his estate as high as $500 million.

The most likely scenario, says tax lawyer Michael Kosnitzky, of Boies, Schiller & Flexner in New York and Miami, is that there is a will and that it sets up a trust or a series of trusts into which all of Prince's assets at the time of his death will flow.

Unlike wills and probate court proceedings, such trusts can be kept confidential from the public. If Prince chose this route, it's possible we may never know the true extent of his estate or his plans for it after his death.

"Usually, wealthy, organized people or sophisticated celebrities use trusts that are set up while they're alive, to determine (what happens after death) in a confidential way, they're not public documents," says Koznitsky. "They don't want the world to know who their beneficiaries (the heirs) are, or special dispositions, etc."

Such trusts are managed by an executor (some states call them "personal representatives"),

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