Considering what triggered her is the court notification the probate was closed, isn’t it a bit late to file any legal challenges? She’s known since the will was read(?) what the situation was, I assume there’s a limit to how long one can wait to file a challenge?
At a certain point what’s done is done.
If you do that, then she gets more than you three; she ends up with a full share and you each get 2/3 share. The correct proportion is give her 1/4 of the three shares and all four of you end up with the same amount, 3/4 share. Math is important.
I think that is an urban legend. Not to say many people don’t do that when writing their own wills.
Yes. IIRC Mommie Dearest left her adopted daughter “i leave her nothing, for reasons which she knows.” it’s hard to argue “I was forgotten” when the person is explicitly mentioned. The usual complaint is undue influence, which would also be hard to do if the inheritance was split equally among the other children.
My father’s will split things 3 ways - to my brother and myself, who lived hundreds of of miles away in Canada, and my nephew (actually step-sister’s child, no blood relative of my dad) who lived 45 minutes away and did all the heavy lifting of getting my parents settled in homes, fetching their stuff, handling business and finances, looking after their mail, errands, doctor visits, paperwork, etc. Even then, my brother and I had to provide the lawyers with letters saying we did not contest the will and approved of the division. (We both did whole-heartedly for the effort he and his wife put in…) I assume NJ has judges who are really touchy about undue influence or such elder coercion.
I never knew wills were public record.
Say I’m a billionaire and I put in my will “I leave $1M to Jane Doe, the secret lovechild of my housekeeper who I had an illicit affair with 15 years ago”, that means any enterprising journalist could unearth this and make it into a story. Is there any way for me to both simultaneously disburse $1M to Jane and also have nobody outside of my family be aware that the affair happened?
Yes. Disburse it before you die.
After all, why would you wait until your child is 15 years old before making financial provision for her?
(And there are other options. You could, for example, establish a trust for Jane while you are living, and then leave $1 million to the trustees in your will. A journalist or member of the public reading the will is not entitled to find out who the beneficiaries of the trust are, so they will know you are making provision for someone or something, but they won’t know who or what.)
True, but there are 3 of us, not four.
So the two of you and her? Then yes, it’s 1/3 a piece.
The problem is, if the love child is not mentioned at all in the will, they may still have the option to sue and claim they were forgotten, if they have not received the same share as the other children. Is Sally really going to be happy with a $5M trust if Bob and Alice get $100M apiece?
Particularly if the trust was set up 15 years earlier and the newly deceased’s net worth has climbed since then?
My will (the one I haven’t signed yet… gotten get on that) leaves everything to a trust that is to benefit my named kids, and it says explicitly that any children not named were intentionally excluded. My husband asked what the purpose of that clause is, and the lawyer said it’s mostly to make it clear the money really goes to the trust, not directly to the kids. (This is basically a tax dodge, by the way.) But I think it would also cover the case of the secret love child.
The notion that a child can sue and get a will set aside if they are not mentioned at all in the will, but can’t sue if they are given what they consider to be an unreasonably small amount, has already been questioned in this thread.
You’d need to look at the laws of the jurisdiction in question to determine what obligations a testator owes to their children, and how free they are to treat marital and non-marital treatment differently. But I’d be astonished if the effect of those laws were to be that in making these judgements a provision for the child made by will is treated differently from a provision not made by will. If you establish a trust with $5 million for your child and that is judged to be insufficient to discharge your obligation to that child, then a bequest of $5 million would be equally insufficient, and therefore doing it by will won’t obviate the possiblity of a challenge.
I was told by my lawyer that you can’t disinherit a child who was not yet born when the will was signed. But other than that, i think parents are generally free to disinherit their children in the US, if they are so inclined. The issue isn’t whether a child can sue for “not getting enough”, it’s whether they can sue for having been inadvertantly left out.
There’s no general obligation to remember anybody when making a will. My friend might think that I should leave him some money in my will because of some signal service that he did me years ago which enable me to become the millionaire I am today, but if I have completely forgotten what he did for me and I do not call him to mind when making my will, he has no remedy for that. Being “inadvertantly left out” of a will isn’t, in general, a cause of action. If I forget to include you in my will, tough; it’s still a valid will.
In the case of a child being left out, that might suggest two possible causes of action, neither of which depends on the omission being inadvertant.
One - and this is obviously jurisdiction-specific - is if the applicable law requires parents to make some provision for their children.
The other is an argument that the omission is evidence of a lack of mental capacity. Forgetting your friend or your second cousin once removed is one thing, but how could anybody forget their own child? So the omission will be used to suggest that the testator was in a fairly advanced state of confusion or mental decline (which of course invalidates the entire will, including the bequests to those who were remembered).
I’m pretty certain that no US jurisdiction required parents to “make some provision” for adult children.
The hypothetical we’re addressing specifies a 15-year old child, so this may still be a live issue.
In Other Common Law Jurisictions With Which I Am Familiar, there are statutory provisions under which an adult child can apply to court to vary a testamentary disposition by a parent on the grounds that the parent has not made adquate provision/proper provision for the child. It wouldn’t amaze me to discover that at least some jurisdictions in the US have similar legislation. But that’s coming from a position of ignorance, and I happily defer to your superior knowledge of what US succession legislation generally says.
Oh, i was thinking of the OP’s adult sister. But yeah, we were talking about a hypothetical 15 year old love child. Sorry.
This.
If the child was provided for 15 years earlier in a trust - so obviously at one point the dead person felt an obligation back then - but is not mentioned when everyone else is, then it’s arguable they were forgotten, dementia, will made when not of sound mind. Hence the suggestion to specifically mention people you disinherit.
Your buddy Bob you have no obligation to - if you never wrote a will, your spouse and children typically (your state may vary) get legally mandated amounts (such as some states, half to the spouse plus the house, the rest split equally among children). Or if there are none, perhaps your third cousin once removed Sam is the default only heir. So if you choose to direct your estate other than the default, you write a will. To prove you meant it, you mention that you disinherit those you choose to, that would normally inherit an appropriate share.
IANAL so I’m not sure what really happens if you don’t mention a child. In the love child example, proving the person knew they had a child and failed to provide, i presume from non-legal apocrypha they have a case. Not sure what bearing a trust fund would have on their claim or their share.
A more interesting scenario happens when the child was never known or acknowledged and shows up out of the woodwork? Always a popular fictional scenario. What weight does it carry? I assume it boils down to “if he had known, he would ahve included his child…”
In most if not all US jurisdictions, a valid spouse can’t be disinherited. They will be entitled to an “elective share” of the estate determined by statute, if the will grants them less than that. In Florida it’s 30%.