Charles Phoenix Talks about Fall Ball

Now that summer is officially over, you might be wondering whether or not fall ball or second season might make sense for your child. Charles Phoenix is a lawyer with information and tips on this subject. If you are familiar with Rhodes Tucker in Florida, you probably know Charles Phoenix a lawyer who serves his clients with his extensive knowledge and attention to details and numbers. He helps clients in a variety of practice areas, including business litigation, corporate law, real estate transactions, and estate planning.

Charles Phoenix is a lawyer who is also heavily involved in youth baseball. He has served as a coach, as well as an administrator, for various leagues and travel teams. If there is a league around you that offers fall ball programs, you might want to take advantage of it for various reasons. Charles Phoenix discusses those reasons below:

Your Child Does Not Like Football, Soccer, or Other Traditional Fall Sports: Does your child live to play baseball or softball? He or she may benefit from participating in a fall ball league. Fall ball provides children with additional time to play a sport that they love with less intensity than in the regular rec season or travel ball. If your child prefers the diamond to other sports, fall ball may be a great option to continue to engage their interest in baseball or softball.

Your Child Gets a Head Start for the Next Season: Whether your child is an all-star or needs additional help learning the fundamentals, practice makes perfect. If he or she has lofty goals for next spring, fall ball is an excellent opportunity to work on technique or new skills. For example, your child might spend the entire fall ball season developing as a switch hitter with live game play against less difficult pitching.  Because many children participate in other sports in the fall, coaches and volunteers can provide additional instruction and focus on individual players. If you are looking for additional instruction and one-on-one attention, fall ball is an excellent opportunity.

The Weather Is Perfect for Baseball and Softball:  The weather is great for baseball and softball in every part of the country. The winter is another story in most states, so you might as well take advantage of the good weather while you can. The three or four months from December to the start of the spring season are long without a glove or bat. Fall ball can extend the time your child can play baseball or softball in a semi-competitive setting.

Charles Phoenix Explains Why Should Plan Your Estate

If you haven’t looked into estate or business succession planning, you should do so now. As President John F. Kennedy said long ago in his famous State of the Union Address, “the time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining.”  Charles Phoenix is a lawyer who has experience in several practice areas, including estate planning, corporate law, and business matters. Charles Phoenix has helped many clients preserve their estates, protect their family businesses, and meet their financial goals. Charles Phoenix warned, “The unfortunate truth of the matter is that a poorly planned estate or business succession could result in significant costs, business disruption, confusion, family fighting, and lost assets.”

Whether you have experienced a major family event or your business is moving along as successfully as always, a lawyer like Charles Phoenix can help you identify your opportunities and develop an estate and succession plan to meet your needs and goals. Charles Phoenix says  estate and succession planning are musts to achieve goals like:

You Want to Avoid Probate: In the event that you pass away or become incapacitated, you likely do not want your family and businesses to end up in probate court. For one, your wishes may not be carried out – they will be left to the court and family members to sort out.  Probate is also a very slow process, and it can end up costing the estate significantly. Depending on the state, probate costs could end up being as much as ten percent of the gross estate.

Probate cases are also public record, so anyone can look up your estate’s debts and assets, as well as all distributions. In some cases, scammers  will use this public information to target vulnerable family members.

You Want to Avoid Disruption to the Family Business: If you have a family business, your passing could also cause corporate governance disputes that might diminish the business value or cause operational disruption.   Estate and success planning are vital to safeguarding the business for your loved ones.

You Want to Avoid Estate Taxes: One of the most common reasons why individuals look into estate planning services is because they want to avoid estate and inheritance taxes. Many estate planning techniques using gifts and various trusts can help reduce, defer, or eliminate estate taxes altogether.

You Want to Avoid Confusion or Bad Blood: There have been way too many horror stories about friends and family fighting over who gets what from an estate. In a situation where there isn’t estate planning, the end result could be family fighting or costly probate court proceedings. A very emotional period for the entire family occurs during incapacitation in a hospital.  Part of a comprehensive estate plan is a living will and health care surrogate designation in order to carry out your wishes in the event you no longer can communicate.

Unfortunately, too many estates have been susceptible to unnecessary costs and fighting. You should take the step toward protecting your assets and your beneficiaries by hiring Charles Phoenix or another attorney who handles these complex matters as soon as possible.

Charles Phoenix Discusses Mistakes Landlords Sometimes Make

If you are the owner of a commercial rental property, there are a number of things you should consider.   Mistakes could result in you being sued or losing an eviction actions.  At other times, you might miss some great opportunities. Charles Phoenix is a Florida Bar Board Certified Real Estate Lawyer who specializes in commercial real estate.

Not Including State and Federal Disclosures in Your Leases

Every state will be a little different regarding required disclosures, but there are a few that you will certainly need to include – the presence of lead-based paint and mold. Many disclosures only relate to residential properties, like disclosing a recent death that occurred in an apartment or registered sex offenders in the area. Nonetheless, including disclosures, even ones that might not even apply, is a good idea.  For one thing, you want to be prepared for a clean eviction if needed.  Some tenants may be able to sway a court that you omitted a disclosure, which the tenant can use as leverage in the eviction case.  Be sure to look at your state’s disclosure laws to learn more.

Drafting Leases that Run On and On:

If you said it right, you only need say it once.  Charles Phoenix has seen so many leases thrown together by lawyers, real estate agents, and landlords.  These leases often include conflicting provisions – some even include multiple sections covering the same topics in different ways.  For example, one section on page 4 might say the tenant must have $1,000,000.00 of Commercial General Liability insurance, while a section with a similar title on page 7 might say the tenant must have $2,000,000 of Commercial General Liability insurance.  These inconsistencies will work against the landlord and they often run the full range of topics – everywhere from who maintains the air conditioning system (the landlord in one section, the tenant in another section, and the landlord if the tenant has a service contract in place in another section).  A lease, like many documents, goes without a thorough reading until … there’s something to fight about.  A good lease has logical topical headings, uses fewer words than more, has a definition section that is logical, and is organized from most important topics (like the rent amount and due dates) to the least interesting (like that clause at the back that says a court should interpret the lease to make sense, unless there is no way to read a particular clause in a way that makes any sense).  A landlord sells her most important right (possession) to a tenant for money (rent), so the landlord must write a lease that best provides her the ability to evict a bad tenant and retake possession.

Ignoring the Opportunity to Reduce or Defer Rent in a Bad Economy

In bad economies, tenants typically suffer significant revenue loss.  As a result, tenants will struggle to make rent payments on time or at all.  Ultimately, many tenants go out of business and the shopping center or office building starts to look bleak.  The landlord, of course, has obligations to banks to pay on loans and to governments to pay property taxes, neither of which goes away when a rental unit goes dark.

Landlords, like all humans, tend to insist their tenants honor their agreements.  The reality, however, is that many tenants cannot.  The landlords, then, must choose between insisting on what they agreed upon and watching the lights go out or taking some less intuitive approaches.

One landlord Charles Phoenix once represented during the Great Recession actively engaged his tenants and offered to re-negotiate leases to temporarily reduce rents.  His thought process was that his shopping centers would be more desirable to tenants and customers if they were full than if they were empty – he was protecting against the spiraling effect that was seen all over the country.  He was an accountant by nature and concluded that each shopping center wasn’t about each individual tenant, but about the shopping center as a whole.  The survival of the shopping center was rent.  He concluded that he would receive more rent in both the long term and the short term by temporarily easing lease burdens on struggling tenants than he would get with vacancies.