Suppose I don’t leave it to someone with conditions. Suppose instead I divide my property into “parts”. I’m sure you’ll say it’s fine for me to leave half of my property to my daughter, and the other half to my son - but suppose instead I leave my house to my children subject to a life estate for my brother? Is that OK under your rules? Can I leave the income from a trust to my husband during his lifetime and then the trust itself to our kids upon his death? It’s not 100% clear to me what exactly you mean by “outright gift”.
Good point.
Sure, we as a society can say that. We can say anything we like. What most of the respondents here are telling you is that there is no convincing logical or ethical justification for saying that.
If we as a society are bound to respect your wishes about which survivors get your property, then I see no logically valid justification for arguing that we don’t have to respect your wishes about the conditions under which they can get it.
How do you intend this to apply to, say, institutional endowments? If somebody leaves an inheritance to found a hospital, do the hospital’s subsequent administrators have the right to turn it into a casino, for example? Or do you consider that the existence of the hospital as a separate corporate entity gives it a continuing right to the use of the inheritance in its existing form?
If so, then there’s a fairly simple way around your attempt to prohibit conditions on legacies: just set up the legacy as some kind of independently existing legal entity with a stated purpose, and then nobody’s allowed to divert that entity’s inherited property to a different purpose.
As has been repeatedly pointed out to you, one of the chief problems with this ethical-emotional argument is that it applies just as much to the designation of beneficiaries in the first place as it does to imposing conditions on the beneficiaries.
If you are trying to justify your proposal by invoking the moral unfairness of letting the dead influence the fates of the living, then logically speaking there is no moral right to specify the disposition of property after death at all.
In words of one syllable: No trusts, no wills.
That’s your business- you can easily just leave your assets as a lump sum to whoever you want.
But why do you care if others choose to put stipulations on it? I mean, I think it’s entirely reasonable for a grandparent to set up a trust that would give money to their grandchildren upon the achievement of a few select milestones- like be above a certain age and to have earned a college degree. If nothing else, the looming prospect of receiving a nice payout may be incentive to actually follow through, while getting the inheritance outright might have negative effects.
I would suspect that a lot of it is in how the trust is actually written and interpreted. I mean, how would you enforce the “can’t marry a black person” stipulations? Is it one drop? Is it some specified percentage? That would all have to be written into the trust and interpreted by the trustee(s).
A common one is to keep the money “in the family”, meaning that with generation skipping trusts (typically for tax avoidance purposes), there’s often a desire to only award the money to their descendants, and not to those descendants’ spouses in community property states.
In other words, if my grandmother left me money in a trust, she might set it up in a way that makes me jump through certain hoops to ensure that my wife wouldn’t ever see a dime of it in a divorce, or have any control over it. That wouldn’t be the case if it was just given to me outright- it would be community property, and in case of any divorce, half would be hers by right.
But again, the thought in my OP does not have to be taken to such an extreme conclusion. We can say that a testator can control the disposition of his or her property, but it must be unconditional.
Of course you want what is best for your kids. But at what point do they get to decide what’s best for them? Shouldn’t we each as individuals have the right to determine that for ourselves, or should grandpa who died in 1950 get to decide?
Under your personal situation, is there anything from stopping your wife, after you pass on, from spending all of the money travelling the world with her new 19 year old husband and blowing all of the money so that the kids end up with nothing? (And no, she didn’t tell me that. 
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Agreed, you can leave half to your daughter and the other half to the son.
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Agreed. You may leave a life estate to brother and the remainder to the children. That is not a conditional gift. It is in the sense that the brother has to remain alive, but like all of us, he will pass away at some point. This, IMHO, is an outright gift simply split between people.
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Agreed. You are not placing any conditions on the gift, but merely splitting it between people. Your husband gets the income from the trust and the kids get the corpus of it. Although I am more leery of this sort of thing because while your husband is alive, there is this pool of money that nobody can touch because of your dead hand wishes. I would be willing to compromise on this one, so long as if at any time both your husband and your kids agree to liquidate the trust and have it go to whomever, then they should have the absolute right to do that.
No. I’m not controlling anyone’s spending (even theoretically - I have no husband and the kids will each get an equal share). I’m controlling, again, theoretically, the timing of disbursals or the final distribution of property. You’re the one freaking out about shudder Control! Control! Control! If anyone places conditions on something they’re giving me they’re turning me into a CHILD!!!
As an amusing aside, one of my grandmothers used to occasionally sit with her elderly daughter, my aunt, and they’d list the properties that were “stolen” from the family over the generations, by men who remarried, died, and left everything to the new wife who then willed it all to her relatives rather than his kids. Of course Grandma and Aunt, after all that complaining, died intestate. I was taking care of Aunt as she died. She told me to tell her husband (wheelchair bound and half deaf) that he needed to will me their house, because I was such a help and her family had paid the down payment for it. I didn’t touch that one with a ten foot pole.
Oh, and BTW, the provisions of wills can be set aside if all heirs agree and are willing to sign a document attesting their approval of the new arrangement. At least in the states that I’m familiar with, at the times I was dealing with it. So if the parents disinherit child D, but children A, B, and C think that’s bull, they can agree to change the disbursement of the estate. That wouldn’t work with trusts. At lease with living trusts any complaints from beneficiaries have to be lodged within the first year of the trust being in place. Again, other states and other times may vary.
I think a perfectly reasonable answer to why it is morally OK for me to put stipulations on how my money is spent after I die is because I am the one who earned it. You can spend (or not spend) the money you **earn **however the hell you like. But I can morally put stipulations on the money that I **earned ** that is being **gifted **to you, whether I am alive or not.
We could, but I don’t think it is a good idea. I like the idea of putting conditions, where appropriate, on what the people who get my money can do with it. In general, I don’t feel the need to do that, but I can see how it might be a good idea for other situations.
As Smitty says, at the point where they get my money rather than their own.
Nothing is stopping her. But we are talking about putting conditions on people you don’t trust.
Plus, the 19 year old gigolos had best be careful. Who outsmarts who is highly likely not to turn out as they expect. When my wife wants to ruthlessly exploit her love toys for carnal purposes, she knows how to do it so the love toy likes it.
Trust me on this.
Regards,
Shodan
If we decide that a dead people no longer has rights over property, then would others still be required to honor contracts to a dead person’s estate?
Insurance payouts? Debts? Retirement funds? Tax refunds?
If a person that dies can not control outgoing money, then do they have a right to incoming?
Do you think kids under the age of majority should get all their inheritance immediately because control is bad? That the common limitations about disbursing money to them except for their welfare and education are bad?
Our trust had provisions doling out money to our kids in chunks until they reached a reasonable age. That way if they made mistakes they could recover. They are both older than our maximum disbursement age, and so would get everything right now, but I don’t regret writing that into the trust. I trust you’ve seen many similar provisions.
How is that going to work? Once I got the assets to a trust they are no longer mine, they are the trustee’s. What relevance will my death have to anything?
I didn’t quite read the whole thread, so sorry if someone has mentioned these issues.
If you set up a trust with a trustee to run it after your death, then you as a person who is alive have hired someone to perform a fiduciary duty for you. But once you die under your rules, the trustee could say, “Screw the beneficiary, the settlor is dead, and I have legal control of the assets. I’m going to pay myself a salary consisting of the entire trust’s assets. That the settlor wouldn’t want that is irrelevant because they’re dead.” In reality, the trustee still has a fiduciary duty to the settlor after their death, and can’t do whatever they want with the money even if they have full legal authority over it.
Ok, you say, how about if they just are required to give it to the beneficiaries free and clear. But what if there’s an income beneficiary and a completely different remainderman (often a charity)? There’s no clear way to divide such funds except by simply keeping the trust around and paying out the income to the beneficiary until that person’s death and giving the corpus to the remainderman at that time.
Ok, you say, so they have the duty to keep the money for the trust’s beneficiaries, and if there’s multiple beneficiaries, the trustee has to follow the trust’s rules in distributing the assets, but if there’s only one beneficiary, then they should really get it outright. But what if the beneficiary is special needs? Or is a dog (see Leona Helmsley)? What would it mean to have such an entity get full control of the money if they cannot truly exercise that control? Where do you draw the line between someone with special needs that literally cannot comprehend how money works, and someone who just spends all their money whenever they get it? Why have a rule that dissolves the trust when there is exactly one beneficiary, but keep the settlor’s desires intact whenever there’s more than one beneficiary?
You and others keep saying “my money.” Is it your money, right now. But when you are worm chow, why do your wishes remain those that society should respect. I know I keep asking that, and I don’t mean to, but it seems that we keep this tennis match going between: 1) It’s my money and 2) But why should we respect your wishes when you are no longer here to enforce them or modify them? What about a Brewster’s Millions type of scenario? Why should the courts be open to play your little game from the grave?
They don’t, but their beneficiaries do. That is not dead hand control.
Of course the age of majority should come into play. That is a longstanding and universally recognized concept that young children cannot control property. The same goes for people with disabilities; the law appoints them a guardian, not because we want to control them, but because they are objectively incapable of providing for themselves. In these situations, they get a guardian ad litem and an independent judge to determine this, not a testator’s good or foolish wishes.
That sort of begs the question of whether there should be trustee’s to provide for competent adults.
Okay, how about this compromise: Your conditions must expire and vest completely within seven years after your death or within seven years of the beneficiary reaching the age of majority, or the removal of a legal disability. The conditions will be only ones recognized in law such as maintenance trusts, education trusts, spendthrift trusts, etc. No not marrying black people or so long as no alcohol is consumed or so long as you visit your mother in the nursing home. Only those conditions that society approves of.
How is that any different to the current position? Gifts and trusts that are contrary to public policy are already void.
Sorry to disrupt the flow of conversation with this, but I wanted to knock out one of your assumptions.
I am somebody who refused the $1 million, or at least the inheritance, in favor of running my own life. Now, are we talking about literally $1 million? Maybe but probably not quite, all I can say is I don’t know what the amount would have been. And the situation is different from your dead-hand gripe in that it was clear while I was a young adult that I could not both run my own life and get a future inheritance from my still-living parents. Point is, their conditions were absolutely unacceptable, plus involved a significant amount of abusiveness, and so I chose to say, “screw it!” and made my choice.
Never have I regretted it. Never have I second-guessed my choice, not even for a second. Walking away was a kind of liberation for me, and “doing it my way”, in the context of my previous experience, means absolutely everything to me. To stick around and do what would have been required to get the money at some future date after the parents were dead would have made my life not really worth living.
I don’t know if I can give a philosophically complete answer to the overall debate- my basic opinion is that it is their money, they can put conditions on how it is used after they are gone if they choose. All I’m saying is that if your position is grounded in the notion that “refusing $1 million/a family inheritance is a non-starter”, I am living proof to the contrary.
I’d rather be free.
So a guardian could decide that a college education is foolish, and withhold the money for it?
I can kind of see the point that the eventual recipient of the money should be able to decide without being restrictions from the trust, but I’d hope that the parent’s wishes would be given priority over those of the guardian.
This just about sums it up.
In general, and speaking as a non-lawyer, it looks as if the main problem with any posthumous financial arrangements - whether wills or trusts - is if any conditions are imposed. More so if they are open to endless interpretation, such as the requirement not to marry a black person. The lawyers would have a field day with “how black is black?” Or if the money is paid out against a condition that is not fulfilled later. There is a clear answer for the latter: once the money has been paid out, that’s it. It cannot and should not be paid back later. And paid back to who, in any case? Once the estate of the deceased has been liquidated, that’s it. The only exception concerns, says, royalties, which trickle in for up to 70 years, depending on the jurisdiction, but there are already rules in place to take care of such a situation.
And at the expense of repeating argument s that were better expressed elsewhere, either you have a full say (barring any legal restrictions, such as to prevent disinheritance) in what happens to your pelf post mortem, or none at all.
It’s not just that it’s “my money” now, though. Ownership not only implies current possession, but also the right to control the property against others in the future. So what is “my money” right now is also “my money” in the future (unless I choose to exercise my power over it). A vast majority of property laws recognize that ownership isn’t just a “right now” thing, it includes the right to control it in the future.
Now, you could, I suppose, consider death to be a complete termination of ownership. So, upon your death, you own absolutely nothing and everything you had previously owned is now up for grabs. But we’ve agreed to recognize, correctly I believe, that death doesn’t terminate all ownership. That my express wishes made before I died do carry legal weight. Whether I choose to donate my property to a charity, distribute it unequally among my kin, or create a trust, my ownership of the property (my wishes expressed while alive) continues in a manner after my death.
I really think that will open a huge fucking can of worms that simply doesn’t need to be opened. You’d create countless arguments over what kind of trust is proper or not and create the need to rewrite wills, etc with a whole new law in mind. Which is great for estate lawyers, but maybe not so great for society.
Also I’d have to believe if trust/inheritance documents telling people not to marry blacks were at all common, the media would be somewhat interested. Can’t rule out that it happens and is kept quiet by lawyers/family, but strikes me as a rather unlikely example to justify how often it’s been mentioned.
Although that can be a matter of style of argument, some people feel the flair of extreme examples somehow makes their arguments more convincing. I tend to find the opposite. If it’s just a hyperbolic way of saying ‘people could put in stipulations too much at odds with society’s general welfare’ then of course that could be the case. And in the past there have been quite intrusive limitations as for example laws enforcing the custom of primogeniture, the first born (legitimate son, generally) had to get the land, others had to fend for themselves, to preserve a stable aristocracy. Or inheritance/estate tax is in that category. I don’t think those can be attacked, or defended, simply by saying either ‘it’s my money’ or ‘we can pass whatever laws we see fit’.
I would personally lean in the direction of more personal freedom and less social engineering, so fewer restrictions and more individual property rights. But it’s an opinion, not some deductive conclusion. And it’s not absolute.
Reading the thread though I’m wondering what actual common problem it’s addressing. Back to estate tax, though not to derail the discussion. I can see a practical reason people want more estate tax, to get a measurable (even if it wouldn’t actually be that significant) amount of tax revenue, so the govt can spend more and/or other people pay less tax. A general public policy issue with stipulations in wills I don’t see as much practically speaking. OK if lots of people were overtly dictating racial discrimination in their wills, but are they actually? If it’s something like spendthrift clause in a trust, I guess it’s the person’s bad luck for coming from a family where they’d get a trust. Seriously, could potentially be a public policy issue, I just don’t see how it actually is, non-hypothetically but really right now.
How about when money is left not to a person, but to an institution? Would you prevent people from endowing a scholarship at a school, say one that gets given to left handed dental students from Utah? How about money left to a school’s athletic department? Since the donor in these 2 cases is dead, can the school decide to use the money however they want to? If the donor sets up the endowment and donates the money before they die, are stipulations about it’s use only valid as long as the donor is alive?
Yeah, I asked about that too back in post #42. Still curious as to what the answer would be.