My newly dead uncle -- a prize in his Crackerjack house?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

One of my uncles died today – pretty much a total mystery man. I think I’ve met him twice, when I was 7 or 8 as a child, and about 35 years later at a get together of his siblings (the only time AFAIK that they have been all in one place since the first one (my dad) came to America in 1948.)

He never married or had kids. He was more or less an urban recluse. I have a cousin who lives a couple miles a way from him who filled me in on how he communicates. He doesn’t answer his phone or have an answering machine, or answer his door. So, you go to his house, put a note on his door, and he will call you back later. Or not.

Anyway, he was the black sheep of the family, and according to his my dad and the other uncles, a notorious liar and teller of tall tales. He claimed he was rich and had all kinds of investments and traveled the world, and maybe he did. But his home is a little rented crackerbox house, and his car is an old beater Caddy.

So this weekend my cousin, my sister and I will go into his home and see what there is to see. My cousin and my sister are of the opinion that he won’t have more than a few hundred bucks in a checking account, and we will end up spending more than that hiring an estate lawyer and getting the old guy cremated.

We’ve also discussed the idea of simply abandoning his stuff if we don’t find anything of value. None of us are close to him, none of us want to become executors for a worthless estate, or be on the hook for legal fees unless we know we can at least get the costs back by getting access to some financial assets of his.

Personally I would go the abandonment route unless we can find 10K or more. He has 6 siblings and about 30 nieces and nephews who would presumably all get a peice of whatever is left after expenses. We’re assuming there’s no will, but who knows, we might find one.

So if we find an insurance policy, or a bank account with at least a few grand in it, or a safety deposit box key, we’ll hire a lawyer amd go from there.

My sister is the sentimental one. She said, “We can’t just arbitrarily decide on a minimum value of what it’s worth to deal with his estate and bury him decently.” And I replied, “Of course we can.” My cousin and I already figured that the best place for his ashes would be in the ashtray at the local OTB parlor – a lot of his stories seemed to revolve around gambling. Though I understand that in Illinois they’ve cut out indoor smoking so the ashtray may be gone.

So maybe my sister will want to take the estate thing on for herself if cousin Mike and I figure it’s not worth it. Or maybe another family member will step in, though it seems doubtful.

I have this hope that we’re gonna hit the lotto – he’ll have a couple of mil in stocks and cash, and his tall tales will turn out to be a little but true.

I’ll know by next week.

2

If you’re willing to walk in there and take a chance on winning the lotto then you take the responsibility if you lose the lotto and tidy up the estate.

Either way seems like it will be an adventure.

3

View it as not only an archeological dig ( Treasure!) but a chance to figure out this man’s physcological workings.
One of our BFF has a pair of hoarder grandparents ( who are younger than my mom, incidently.) and to get throught their house it is a path through the mounds of shit. They have a pole barn that is packed to the rafters in junk and a two car garage ( with a car buried in it, that hasn’t seen the light of day in 10 years.) packed to the rafters there.

They aren’t the Collyer Brothers, but they are on the right track and in good physical health. One is starting to show signs of nuttiness, meanness, spitefulness and flakiness and I’ve braced my friend for Alzheimer’s for her in the next few years.

It sickens me and gives me the willies to walk through this place, but I promised our friend that when the grandparents shuffle off to the Promised Land, I would gladly volunteer to help throw everything away. To shift through every pile for a possible sale would be too laborous. Just renting a couple of dumpsters is the easiest solution.
I strongly suspect your uncles place to be something like this.

Take pictures!

4

Yeah, definitely!

Story from my family (long before my time)…my dad’s uncle “disappeared” for decades. That is to say, he might drop a post card every so often and it would turn out he was in Needles, California or somewhere else with no connection to anybody or anything. He had basically opted out of the family and lived alone.

WWII had changed him, the family guessed. He’d been in the infamous “death march” in the Philippines but managed to escape. I suppose the family reached out to him but years on end went by with no response to letters and they gave up.

Short story long, when he died some family went out and took stock. They found cans of food absolutely everywhere. Glove compartment of the car, sock drawer in the bedroom, garage shelves next to a can of paint…he’d never gotten over being half-starved and was never going to be too far from food again, they guessed.

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My father was a hoarder, if it was remotely useful, he kept it.

I took a lot of good things out of his house after he passed, and made 6 trips to the scrap yard with my truck to unload scrap metal, and we still filled 3 20-yard dumpsters of miscellaneous… treasures.

6

The right thing to do is to see his estate properly settled. Never mind the cash value: look for things of family interest like documents, photographs, letters, and paintings. And in the longer term it will be of benefit to you: you’ll know what to do the next time and if you do it well, you will gain kudos within the family.

7

I’m guessing you never watch Antiques Roadshow. There is probably some table or chair or small knick-knack that is quite valuable. If he has any WWII stuff that would be interesting.

8

If you find a mysterious wallet, don’t tell us.

9

Bring a laptop with Web access.

Cross-check his bookshelf with Amazon, at least.
Last weekend, at a Church rummage sale, I picked up a Chandler First Edition. Damn near free.

10

It’s…just…all…porn. Lots and lots of porn.

11

If there’s a dirt floor in the cellar, do NOT dig it up.

12

Someone at work said, maybe I find a bunch of wallets and IDs, and a churned up back yard, and maybe even other “trophies”.

13

There won’t be much of anything of interest to the family (other than money) – he was almost totally divorced from it. Like I say, his siblings got together once in the 50 years they’ve been in this country.

My cousin said he was in the uncle’s house, once, maybe 5 years ago. It wasn’t packed with stuff like a hoarder would do, just pretty dusty and dirty and very small.

My sister was appalled that my cousin and I even discussed the possibility of abandoning the estate if we can’t find anything of value. My guess is that she would step in and do the work if we said no. And then I would be obliged to help her; for her sake, not for my uncle’s.

14

Well of course, you’re in Wisconsin. That’s where serial killing was invented. It’s like Krausening or something.

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I’m wondering why your sister thinks you have some obligation to do anything with respect to this dead person’s property? Of course, that is provided you don’t cherry pick anything for yourselves and then walk away.

Unless there is a will, whatever assets exist will (most likely) be divided 6 ways, with one sixth going to each sibling (and their descendants). I can’t imagine why someone would feel there is anything morally wrong about simply abandoning property you have no interest in. Heck, if any of the other sibs or their kids are interested, let them go through the effort.

OTOH, I see potential problems aplenty about being the first ones in the house and handling things informally. You go in, take a look around, and see nothing of value. Then years later Cousin Izzy comes asking where that ruby encrusted stickpin is that dear departed uncle always promised him…
You would do well to have more than one person present, from more than one “branch” of the family. Might want to send an e-mail or something asking if each sib’s “line” wants to send someone along.

Sounds like ridiculous effort, I know. But some of the nastiest business I have ever seen has concerned estate disputes.

16

Even easier than the dumpster is a craigslist ad inviting people to come and help themselves to whatever junk they want. Even if you still have to get a dumpster afterward, I bet people will carry away quite a bit of crap for you - for free!

17

Sorry to hear about your uncle.

It’s perhaps not really accurate to say “your loss” since you’ve only seen him twice. You probably have more emotional attachment to the grocery store checker that you see every other week.

Definitely take the time to fine-tooth-comb everything. When my ex’s mother died, they found she’d squirreled away a few hundred dollars in cash tucked randomly into books. A five here, a twenty there. No idea if she was just using the first available piece of paper as a bookmark, or if she was intentionally hiding spare cash. They also found a couple thousand dollars worth of uncashed Social Security checks that expired long before she did.

The real fun was the storage shed in the back yard that was completely filled with used (and washed) plastic food tubs - Cool-Whip, margarine, that sort of thing. Each was closed and stacked, rather than nested, so they spent a few hours just opening tubs and nesting them for more compact disposal. Making it even stranger was that some of the tubs had stuff in them. Nothing of value or even much interest - wine corks in one, a few paperclips in another, etc.

18

I can believe this. My SiL had a pretty bad time. Her brother was named executor and he went over and changed all the locks before anybody even had a chance to go in to inventory what was there. I hear it got really ugly.

That was 15-20 years ago and I don’t think any of them even speak to each other any more.

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I just want to speak up in support of Dinsdale’s advice. Even if you’re 100% sure you know all the rest of your family, what’s to say that crazy cousin Ellen won’t marry a gold digger three years down the road, who pushes her to sue for her share of the wealth the OP sucked out of the house before declaring it valueless?

20

Actually, this is why I’m going to be there, as a witness that my cousin doesn’t steal or hide anything away. It is something he specifically mentioned. He also plans to tell the other sibs when we are going and invite them to come along too.

He doesn’t expect any to show, though. Two siblings and their families are still in Ireland, one is dead with no children, one is his dad, one is my dad who is dead, and the last is too old to travel and has a child who doesn’t drive. Pretty much anyone else who could come will have to fly in. And I see I misspoke earlier about the number of cousins. I have about thirty, but that total is from both sides of the family. From my uncle’s side, the total is 14 including my two siblings.

The dilemna we’re facing is that we’d have to hire a lawyer to do anything more than simply scoop up any loose cash we found at his house. Odds are pretty good the police have already ripped off any obvious cash lying around, though there certainly might be some hidden. Having done some asking around, and having not too dissimilar experience in the family, we expect that cost to be somewhere around 2 grand. And a cremation will be somewhere between 500 and a thousand. So we’re already up to nearly 3 grand, for basically a total stranger.

Add to that, we have some previous experience passing the hat around the family for an earlier financial crisis, and it came back empty before except for the 3 of us. That was a cousin who’d screwed up the distribution of another family member’s estate – some unexpected bills came in after she’d already sent out the checks – and she asked for $300 per person back to cover the bills. Almost nobody sent money back.