My elder brother and I are my Mom’s only kids. He and I are estranged (largely by my choice), he and Mom are estranged (entirely by his choice). At some point my Mom is going to die.
She and I were discussing this a while ago and I told her I hoped she’d split the inheritance 50/50 and she said she wasn’t going to. I’d get more and Bro would get less.
I explained to her that her dying would bugger me up but good for a fair while and I didn’t want to have to deal with Bro.
My Bro would of course find out about her death and come sniffing around about the will and, if he felt short-changed (which he likely would even at 50/50) would contest, argue, invoke lawyers and basically try to get more.
I hate talking about money and I utterly loathe arguing about it. Arguing about the fiscal remains of my beloved mother would be about ten steps less pleasant that cancerous-hellishness to me. Especially if the end result is that most of the inheritance goes to enrich lawyers.
I don’t have much interest in revisiting this conversation (Mom considers it morbid and I consider it virulently distasteful) but I’m curious if I’m possibly being:
a)reasonable by asking her to provide for him as well as she does for me
b)somewhat precious
c)just plain silly
I guess I was pretty lucky when my mom passed as far as inheritance goes. None of my siblings wanted to argue about who gets what, and Mom had split things evenly for us to take care of. There was very little discussion that wasn’t met with a consensus between us, and we’ve worked things out pretty fairly.
I’d try to talk your mom into doing things evenly, even if your elder brother is estranged from the family, as you’ve made it pretty clear that it’s going to be a huge legal battle if he feels short-changed by any part of the situation. Does your mom have a living will set up, and papers designating a power of attorney in case something happens? If not, I’d talk to her about setting that up, as you may end up having a situation where Mom becomes terminally ill and Elder Brother tries to come in and be the “hero”, if only for the inheritance points.
Let your mom do what she wants to do. It’s not like she’s leaving him nothing, but even if she were, that’s her right.
You won’t have any trouble with the brother if the will is drawn up properly. Your mom’s lawyer might even advise her to explain in the will why she’s giving one son more property than the other. Your brother might give you a hard time, but if mom’s will is clear, he’d probably have a hard time finding a lawyer who’d waste time contesting it.
And you could always give your brother some of your share. Just don’t tell mom that’s what you’re going to do. I’d hate to go to my grave thinking that my kids weren’t going to do what I specified in my will.
This is what I’d suggest. Let your mom do what she wants, and if you want to even things out after she’s gone, you always have that option.
Another suggestion is that, if you really think your brother is likely to contest a less-than-half share, have your mother talk to her attorney about that. Depending on your jurisdiction and circumstances, there may be things that the lawyer would do differently if the will is particularly likely to be challenged.
If there is an unequal distribution, and if your brother takes it to court, you can make a 50/50 split at that time conditional upon him going away.
Another option is for your mother to put an unequal split in her will, with the condition that if a beneficary contests the split, then that beneficiary gets nothing. (Please note that an estate lawyer in her juristiction could advise if this sort of term is permitted in that jurisdiciton – they are in mine but I don’t know about hers.)
I don’t know if it was at the advice of lawyers, but my estranged step-sister is getting $1000 from step-dad’s estate and the rest goes to my mom and me. He did this deliberately with the thinking that since she’s his direct relative she’ll get the estate without a will, or can contest things if she gets nothing in his will. By leaving her a pittance, it’s obvious that’s what he meant and he didn’t leave her out of the will.
When my grandmother died, she left her posessions 50/50 to her two children, my mum and my uncle, both of whom had an ongoing relationship with her and with each other at the time.
My uncle promptly sued my mother to try to get it to be a 95/5 split. She ultimately agreed to 65/35 to make it all go away. They are no longer on speaking terms.
Basically, you can’t guarantee you won’t get drama whatever happens. Personally, I think your wanting to go 50/50 is the honorable decision, but don’t stress about it. What will happen, will happen.
Ha, are you my brother-in-law? Hub is estranged from his mother and brother due to some bad choices surrounding her sudden onset mental illness. If there’s anything left of her estate, we have no idea how she will divide it, nor will we fight over it. She can’t deny the first 50 years of his life when they had an extremely close relationship but hey, it’s her choice.
I hate to ask, Zeke, but does your mother have a will, or just a plan? It’s not clear in the OP. If there’s anything that you should be worrying about, it’s whether or not she has an actual will.
I had an aunt who was always talking about who was going to get what. In the end, there was no will. Of course, when she was talking, she was always assuming that her husband would die before she would. It wasn’t a bad assumption. He was older than she was and disabled. Didn’t work that way, though. Fortunately, nobody objected to him getting everything. He’s going to need it.
It doesn’t sound like things will go that smoothly if your mom has no will, though. Do you know for sure that she has one?
Mom definitely should get a written will and mention to the lawyer that it’s likely to get contested. Tell her to ask what happens about taxes if she leaves something to you and later you transfer it to your brother, as this may lead to having to pay two transfer taxes (one for inheritance, and one for transfer of property).
Different jurisdictions have different laws and all: in most of Spain, the minimum that can be left to your children without a previous disowning process is half your assets to be split equally (the same that they get if you die intestate); in Navarra, if your will specifies that they get “what’s legitimately theirs” that means 3 € and the right to bid for the rental of common-usage land from the town where you live (this right is invalid if they do not live in that same town) - this is incontestable. So, you can leave peanuts to a child and all he can do is spend them on 3 packs of tissues to blow his nose with (priced at a traffic light beggar, they’re cheaper in the supermarket).
Tell your mom she can do what she wants with the money, but ask her to name someone else as the exectutor, not you or your brother. Maybe a firm that administers estates as a business.
The point being, it your prother gets all hostile, let him fight it out with somebody else – not you.
Thank-you all very much for your opinions and insights. At the very least I learned about a number of will-tricks:cool:
To those who’ve asked, yes my Mom does have a written will but I neither know nor want to know the terms.
As I said I’m not really willing to revisit this conversation with Mom and so the default position is, as many of you said, it’s her money etc. she can do with it what she wants. I’ve pretty much resigned myself to the anticipated fight
I was just trying t oget a sense from a non-scientific random sampling of people whether or not I’m being a spaz and if so how much of one.
Knowing nothing at all about executors and their powers/responsibilities this struck me as a potentially good way of dodging the worst of it and I think I might see how she feels about the idea.