Mark Ashton

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Defined benefit pensions, the ones that payout monthly, are strange animals.  They are rare today except where unions and public agencies are found, and they can produce some odd results.

Carl Jagnow married his wife Sharon in 1983.  They both taught school and both participated in the Public-School Employment Retirement System (PSERS).  Husband retired in…

This will not be a political piece.  There are enough of those.  But as just about everyone knows, on July 1 the New York attorney general and district attorney indicted both the Trump Organization and its chief financial officer on charges of income tax evasion.  The gravamen of the charges is that the Trump Organization…

The website MarketWatch publishes a kind of Dear Abby column related to family finances that touches on some very real subjects confronting families today.  On July 2, columnist Quentin Fottrell published a column in which a wife laments her husband’s spending habits and wonders whether she could be liable for his debts should he die.…

On May 26, the Superior Court issued an en banc ruling addressing whether a Court can order a child custody litigant to turn over records of her treatment compiled in the context of a MHPA proceeding.  The unanimous decision of the nine-judge panel was that those records were not subject to disclosure.

The opinion appears…

Recall March of 2020.  The country more or less stumbled into its first pandemic in a century and by the third week of March, Pennsylvania and its judicial system were essentially closed.  For the next 10 weeks we were told to quarantine.  Schools, office buildings, almost every form of activity was restricted or closed.  Friends…

This weekend brought a report from an outlet called BGR Media about the child tax credits that are due to start hitting bank accounts in the next few weeks.  This child tax credit, unlike all its predecessors, is being paid to eligible recipients in advance; typically, at the rate of $250-$300 a month depending…

As we have all witnessed, ours is an age when grandparent duties transcend “Saturday” night. Historically, Saturday was grandparent night when parents would have their night out.  Sadly, the explosion in substance abuse among young and middle age adults has forced many older couples to choose between taking their grandchildren in or seeing them placed…

There is hope that the plague is behind us.  Pestilence is on its way either in the form of a lantern fly or the return of the cicada after 17 years of peace.  For the divorce lawyer and his friend in crime, the accountant, there is another crisis emerging.  It’s the war over who gets…