Surely they at least asked to see a letter of appointment or similar indicating that the person seeking to execute the transfer or sale was duly authorized to take such actions?
It’s not the banks/real estate agent’s/county records office’s responsibility to read the will and ensure it is interpreted correctly. But I’m pretty sure they do have to make sure that the person acting on behalf of the estate has appropriate authority to do so.
IANAL.
Eh, no. No will means intestacy. Which means state law will determine how assets are to be distributed, and a court may or may not choose to supervise distribution. But there isn’t necessarily a requirement for an attorney to represent an intestate estate: next of kin or some other person/entity recognized by statute, perhaps even appointed by the court, can do it. The estates personal representative might well find that it would be good to have an attorney, but that’s up to them.
Your friend was trying to make things easy for you, but not necessarily legal. Your mom’s last will that she signed, was her legal last will, regardless of where it was written or if it was not filed in Iowa. Your mother didn’t die intestate. You and your attorney chose to ignore her last will. No skin off anybody’s teeth, as you are her only child. Unless in her last will, she was giving half of her estate to the Church of Scientology.
Was talking with some people over the weekend. They discussed a friend - a lawyer - who was in his 2d marriage with kids. He dropped dead suddenly. He had previously written a will naming his 1st wife as sole beneficiary, and never updated it to account for his second family. So his current family was somewhat fucked.
Funny how stupid people can be about their estates.
I think you are mostly right, except that at one time, when communication was not so easy, and occasionally there were complicated wills with lots of assets and lots of heirs-- pensions left to personal staff who worked several decades; valuable objects left to various family members for reasons; specific sums, and even property left to younger children by name, when otherwise everything went to the oldest child; and sometimes things left to daughters, which could happen only when specified in a will.
Given those conditions, it didn’t happen all that often, but you couldn’t just drop an email, or even make a phone call-- nor send a registered letter-- to an heir. You had to notify by special courier, regular post, or eventually, a telegram, and yes, as many heirs as possible were gathered, to avoid repeating the information, and also to avoid claims that the executor said one thing to one heir, and something else to another.
Another for the list of things that are common in movies and TV but rarely happen in real life-- and in this case, probably never happens anymore.
For most people, their estates aren’t large enough nor complex enough to require a complicated will. Generally, it’s as simple as surviving spouse gets everything. If both die, it’s divided equally among all children.
What most people ignore early in their adult life is “who get’s custody of the kids in the event both parents die”. Most people I know that have kids have never prepared a will for this purpose primarily, and its a huge deal, because while it doesn’t happen regularly, but many couples are killed in car accidents. You then have grandparents, aunts, uncles, fighting over who should take over responsibility for the kids, and the parents wishes aren’t known.
Most of my friends that do have wills with custody arrangements spelled out, have people not related to them getting their kids.
Eh, maybe. But what if Iowa is the kind of state where a new will voids all prior wills? Then what happens? Does the “new” will being absent from the location indicated suggest it was destroyed or otherwise revoked by physical act? What happens if it just can’t be found? Does that unvoid one of the prior wills, or are they all still void, and the new (missing) will fails for want of being found? IANAL, and sure it seems sketchy on first review, but there’s at least a theoretical possibility the actual lawyer @CairoCarol actually engaged came to a good faith, reasoned conclusion based upon Iowa state law.
Yeah, the reason I was willing to pretend none of the wills existed is that the only difference it would have made in the end is that it would have taken extra time, hassle, and legal fees to “translate” the wishes regarding assets held in the last will into what that meant for assets held at the time of death. (There had been numerous changes in home ownership, financial advisors and accounts, and probably some other stuff I’m forgetting.)
Given that the attorney was generously suggesting an approach that would reduce his own fees, and I would have had quite the headache dealing with protracted matters while I was living and working in Indonesia (and getting documents notarized in Jakarta was expensive and time-consuming), it made sense to keep things simple.
I am 100% certain that my mother would have approved - she’d have been appalled at wasting thousands of dollars of my inheritance on attorney fees and possibly airfares between Indonesia and Iowa. Though, knowing her, I’m sure she’d insist that she had an up-to-date will and I’d simply lost it, since she would never admit that her affairs were not in perfect order. (In reality, I suspect she was planning to prepare an updated will that reflected her move back to the United States, but she passed away after 4 months, and hadn’t gotten around to it.)
I don’t think my son was mentioned at all except as the person to whom everything should go if I pre-deceased my mother. The life insurance policy was a separate thing.
My husband was not mentioned in the wills; she left him a couple of nice rugs but only in her handwritten notes that probably had little legal weight and weren’t part of her will.
My mother had a very meticulous will, exactly what one would expect of her. Everything was divided between my brother and me, 50/50, which is what happened.
That was the first lines of the will.
There were two more pages that covered all kinds of contingencies, if my brother and I happened to pre-decease her, including a line that any adopted children my brother or I had were to inherit equally with biological children, which I thought was interesting.
My husband and I had talked about adopting a preschooler when our son was in the first grade, but had never told my mother about this. My brother and his wife had on and off mentioned adopting, but I never took it seriously-- I think they were just a couple who didn’t want children who said this because not wanting children isn’t considered quite nice in our culture (which is wrong, but it is what it is).
This is a good thing to remember about having beneficiaries and JTs on assets. The reason it makes the estate easier to manage is because it gets assets out of the estate by assigning them to other people. The money in the JT bank account was no longer in the estate and was the youngest’s to do with what she wanted. She could have gifted the others $8k, but that would have been totally at her discretion. If someone wants their estate split X ways, then specifying beneficiaries would complicate that.
One way to handle this might be to keep a large asset in the estate–like an IRA-and stipulate the proceeds are to be split relative to how much the heirs have already received from other accounts to which they were beneficiaries. The proceeds from the large asset could ensure that everyone received roughly the same amount from the estate regardless of whether they got it from being a beneficiary or from being an heir.
Funny anecdote: my mom’s will leaves everything to my sister and me “in shares of substantially equal value, to be divided in such manner as they shall agree, or, if they shall fail to agree upon a division within six months after the date of my death, as my Personal Representatives shall determine.”
The will also names the two of us as our mom’s only “Personal Representatives.”
There’s also a provision that if my mom leaves a written statement that is found within six months of the date of her death, its terms take precedence over the terms of the will. This strikes me as pretty dangerous - does the statement even have to be notarized? Can anybody write and “find” such a statement?
The will was actually written by an actual lawyer. It’s incredibly weak.
Typically, as I understand it, a prior will is automatically revoked upon marriage. I think it’s unlikely that the first wife would get everything.
My spouse and I were getting married around the same time we were preparing our wills. We had to put in a clause to show we were anticipating getting married, so that the wills would not be automatically revoked upon our marriage.
I mean, it’s what they’re teaching in bar review courses. Not necessarily the whole will, mind you, but the gift to the former spouse (and possibly to any of the former spouse’s relatives).
Not that bar review courses are law (or even that the bar exam should be a thing anymore).
This sounds like the hand of a meticulous attorney! Mr. Legend and I went to a well-regarded firm that specializes in estate law thinking that we’d just need to update the very simple will we made with the help of a storefront attorney when our kids were little.
They asked us about all kinds of contingencies we hadn’t thought of - what if our married daughter predeceases us, do we want to leave any of her share to our son-in-law? If they had children, how do we want to deal with their share? Who do we want to control the money for minor grandchildren? Do we want the daughter who lives with us to inherit all of the house, and if so, do we want to leave more cash to the other one to balance it out? We own about a quarter of a company that’s based in California, and the partnership agreement specifies details of how that share is dealt with if a partner dies, but how do we want to deal with those privately held shares if both of us die and the rest of the partners aren’t prepared to buy out our heirs?
We walked out of that office with a family trust and a much greater appreciation of the intricacies of estate law. After seeing Mr. Legend deal with first his brother’s estate and then his dad’s and my brother deal with our mom’s, I wanted to spare our daughters some of the problems those very simple and straightforward estates presented. Of course I hope we both predecease both our children, and I expect them to work together and be kind to each other, but heirs need all the help they can get.