Sometimes, there just isn’t any way to be guaranteed to get what you want. That circumstance with your wife’s father - no way to prevent that. If my husband and I decide to get divorced tomorrow , there will be a property division and generally speaking, whatever he gets will be his property and he can do whatever he wants with it . Leave it all to his second wife and second set of kids - or as a gift to his college. It’s his money and up to him.
I can understand why your wife would want to avoid that but I don’t think it’s possible to leave someone access to everything as long as they are single and then have it change if they remarry. You can make a conditional bequest , but having a marriage related condition ( you don’t inherit if you marry or if you marry a particular person or member of a certain group ) is almost certainly not going to be enforced as it is against public policy. You could set up a trust but unless Bob needs someone’s approval to take money out of it for specified reasons , there’s no reason he couldn’t use all the money living it up with wife number two. or take money from the trust regularly and put it in a joint account with the new wife. But if he can only take money from the trust for specified reasons, he doesn’t really have access to all of it.
Then there’s the issue of what is Amy really leaving Bob and can she even put it into a trust - the way my house is titled, it automatically goes to my husband if I die. The bank accounts also - except for the retirement accounts on which he is the beneficiary. My “estate” will consist of two cars and my personal property. Amy’s circumstances might be different - she may have already had significant assets when she married Bob. But if she didn’t and everything they have was created by them together , they will have to divide them as if they were getting divorced - Amy can’t control the contents of joint bank accounts with her will. And she shouldn’t try to control her separate accounts if the balances don’t represent a fair division ( for many years , I had some separate accounts. But they weren’t separate because it was “my money” . They were separate because it was convenient for me to set up holiday and vacation savings accounts to be funded by payroll deduction- and very inconvenient for my husband to show up in person to be added to the account. COVID changed their policy so I could add him )
My husband and I just have to trust each other to take care of our kids after the other dies or else leave something to the kids when one of us dies . And you would think it would not be any sort of issue because they are shared kids - but second wives end up with the money in that situation, too.
Just so I’m clear, you are asking to what extent your wife can impose these constraints on you should she predecease you?
I’m not interested in any discussion of your relationship w/ your wife, but I’m curious about how you feel about her imposing these restrictions on you. And how much of your and your wife’s assets are held jointly?
I’m really ignorant about trusts or estate law. Sorry. Whether it CAN be done effectively, if this were my spouse expressing the concerns, I see it as a question of whether I would find offensive and unnecessary the idea that I would waste the estate upon re-marriage, or whether I would be willing to make some arrangements which would give the spouse some peace of mind. Tough call.
Also, the situation your wife experienced is not terribly unusual. My wife experienced it with one of her grandparents and her father.
While also making sure you leave your spouse in a comfortable position. It’s amazing the number of people who think that if it’s a second marriage, a parent with kids from a first marriage simply shouldn’t give a shit about their spouse - regardless if they’ve been married 4 years or 40 years.
And don’t get me started on the number that feel entitled to their parents’ estates, and think they were “robbed” if their parents choose to leave much of it elsewhere (like to the person they’ve shared their life with for a long while). I get being disappointed, but I don’t get feeling like you were wronged - it wasn’t your money in the first place and you never had a say in where it went, nor should you have.
You can see this playing out over and over, most prominently recently in the very public case of the enormous estates of the late Richard Blum and Dianne Feinstein, as the Blums (daughters from a previous marriage) and Feinsteins (mother and her daughter from a previous marriage) dueled over a trust that on paper should have been reasonably straightforward, but actually wasn’t. Particularly egregious in this case, as it is just a battle over degrees of extreme wealth. There are a shit ton of articles on this, but basically it seems to boil down to never assume the equanimity of blended families where money is involved and be very careful of who you appoint as trustee(s).
I’m not going to say that it isn’t possible. But I will say I’ve never seen this attitude expressed when the first marriage was very short and the second marriage was very long. I though I mentioned this situation earlier, but I don’t see it. The one situation I know where a lot of bad feeling happened was with my cousins. My aunt and uncle were married in 1972 . Somewhere around 2005, my aunt’s mother died and she inherited part of the house, which ended up being sold. My aunt and uncle then sold their house and used the proceeds from that sale and my aunt’s inheritance to buy a new house. In 2010, when they were married 38 years my aunt died. Two years later, my uncle remarried sold that house and bought something with the new wife. My cousins are mad among other reasons because they expect the second wife will ultimately benefit from their mother’s inheritance from their grandmother.
( And some of #2 behavior’s just added to it - she put something about their anniversary on Facebook in June but we went to their wedding in November. The “real wedding” in the Catholic Church was next June - apparently her annulment didn’t come through soon enough. But if you’re as religious as she claimed to be , why have the “fake wedding” in a non-Catholic church rather than waiting for the annulment? )
Nonsense. That was awful advice. If I understand the situation correctly. Which I may not …
If the goal is to prevent the husbands having control of the money, that happens automatically. In every state I’ve familiar with, money any married person inherits is their separate property and the spouse has no claim on it, period. The inheriting spouse can choose to convert the money to joint ownership, they can choose to give it to charity, or they can choose to keep it for themselves. Spouse has, legally speaking, no input and no right to input.
Now there are issues of marital bliss and moral suasion here, and if the couple comes from different money levels or traditions there can be a lot of hard feelings if this topic isn’t addressed early. Mutual incompatible pre-conceived notions are hard to dislodge painlessly.
Mow as well-informed @Doreen said above also in response to you …
If their goal instead is to prevent their inheriting daughter from using any of the money in any way that even slightly benefits the husband, that’s a MUCH taller order. Essentially impossible.
Even if they leave the money directly to the grandkids, that also means Evil Hubby can assume he won’t need to pay for his kids’ college, not leave them any money when he’s gone, etc. So Evil Hubby will still benefit by being able to blow equivalent money of his own on himself instead of setting it aside for the kids.
All of these areas are monster emotional minefields and anyone would be well-advised to talk out with their spouse the various “after one of us is gone” scenarios pretty early in married life and again periodically as you age and circumstances change. It all feel free easy and obvious when you’re both 25, don’t have spit for money, and dying seems incredibly remote. Fast forward to 50- or 60-something, somebody has cancer or whatever, there’s a chunk of change on the table, and the one left behind still has decades left to life a second chapter and, well, lotta ways that can get weird. Proper pre-planned paperwork prevents piss poor performance problems.
This happened to a friend’s mother-in-law. She had divorced her first husband and remarried, and was married for many years. The second husband died intestate, so everything went to probate. His children from his first marriage were convinced they would get everything, even the home she was living in, and they were just waiting to turn her out.
Imagine their shock when the court awarded the home and most of the estate to her, the surviving spouse.
The laws on intestate succession vary a lot by state. But a quick google would have told those “kids” everything they should have known as to the state they’re in.
Where it gets messy is the remarriage where there are new wills made, but one or both aged parent isn’t inclined to share their plans with their first-marriage offspring. So much easier to let sleeping dogs lie and any controversy and hate will be happening only after you’re dead. Some powder kegs are nuclear-armed.
I have a colleague who used to be an alcoholic (although he has been dry for the 50 years I have known him). His parents didn’t want to leave their estate (or his share–I know he had a brother) so they set up a trust and made his wife–now ex-wife–the trustee. He is now 93 and cannot get any of the money since his ex is vindictive.
In the current instance, she could set up such a trust and make her children trustees, but she has to think of all the contingencies.
To second that, I live in California where lots of people have trusts, and we have ours done and redone three times. Never very expensive - what you give is about right. I was trustee for my father’s trust, and while I never took any money out for doing it, I remember looking at what I could charge and it wasn’t all that much. (But it wasn’t a big trust,)
