What happens if there isn't enough money to satisfy a will's provision?

Factual Questions
1

(This is just random curiosity, we have no wealthy relatives we’re waiting to kick off.)

A pleasantly well-off man decides to get his affairs in order. His estate is worth 2 million dollars. He has four children he loves equally, and nobody else he wants to even leave his collection of belt buckles to. Here’s what he decides on:

Adam will get the chunk of range land the father has been leasing out for decades.

Beth gets his nice rural house and all its furnishings.

Cathy gets the family heirloom the father somehow ended up with, a minor piece by some well-regarded 18th century artist that’s been on loan to some museum for ages.

David will get what’s listed as ‘everything else’, basically bank accounts/investment accounts/the jug of pocket change accumulated over the father’s lifetime, whatever.

By amazing convenience, each of these allotments are worth damn near $500,000. Father gets them all together for dinner some night and tells them what he’s decided. Everyone is basically happy: Adam thinks a guaranteed income for doing nothing is nifty, Beth wants the house for her growing family, Cathy has artistic aspirations, and David is an entrepreneur who always has Great New Ideas and can use funding.

Time passes.

Father stays well, but things start going badly. He’d jumped into various investments that hadn’t paid off, the IRS had hit him with an audit and a subsequent BIG fine, and of course all the usual bills kept coming in and going up. To deal with all that, Father had had to cut back on lifestyle, liquidate various investments, mortgaged the house, and even sold off about half of the range land to the rancher who’d been leasing it in order to keep up the payment schedule he’d negotiated with the IRS.

THEN he died (peacefully in his sleep, why not?) without having made any changes to his will.

I’m guessing the IRS will get their money, first of all. Probably gloms onto any of the sorta cash immediately. The bank will get their money from the sale of the house, with any leftover going to the IRS if necessary. Let’s say between those two sources the debts are fully satisfied but Beth and David have zippo of what was supposed to be their inheritances. (Well, David maybe gets the jug of coins.)

Does Adam just get the smaller piece of land? Does Cathy still get the painting? (Which actually has gone up in value for ‘art’ reasons.)

Or is the whole estate piled together, cashed out, the debts paid and A, B, C, and D get 1/4 each of the remainder? As sort of acknowledging the Father’s obvious intent and discussions with the lawyer that he wanted to treat them equally?

Who is going to get what?

2

If there isn’t enough cash left in the estate to pay the cash legacy, then the gift fails. Should have written his will better. That’s why you pay lawyers to anticipate these contingencies.

3

Beth gets the House, if beth can pay off the mortgage, Cathy gets her stuff. Adam gets the left over land., David gets whatever is left over- which wont be much. Maybe the land might have to be sold to make the IRS happy.

Of course no estate taxes.

4

After my mother passed away the will stated that all the real property was in a “divided interest”. I got this piece of property, my other siblings got their designated pieces of property.

After doing the required property valuations, the property I inherited was worth several hundred thousand dollars less than another sibling. As there was no equalization clause in the will it didn’t matter that my brother’s property was worth more than double of what mine was, I got what was willed to me with no concern of the value.

Unless there was some equalization clause in the will one child may get something, while another may get nothing.

5

This one seems pretty straightforward to me, because each child has a clearly-defined inheritance. Even if they don’t all end up worth the same amount, there’s no law that says they have to: Dad could, if he had chosen, have left the entire estate all to Beth, just because she’s his favorite.

But what if multiple heirs get specified dollar amounts? Say, $600,000 to Alice, $600,000 to Bob, and the rest to Carol, except that when the old man dies, he’s only worth $1 million? Does that mean that Alice and Bob split it equally, and Carol is out in the cold? Alice gets $600,000 and Bob gets $400,000? The bequeathals to both Alice and Bob are invalid because it’s impossible to fulfill them, so Carol gets all of it?

6

IANAL although I’ve dealt with several estate dispersals. My understanding is that “specific bequests”, that is, bequests of a specific asset or a specific dollar amount, are distributed first. So Alice and Bob get their inheritances before Carol. Also, if there aren’t enough assets in the estate to satisfy the specific bequests, the bequests are reduced proportionally. So Alice and Bob get $500K each, and Carol is indeed out of luck because there’s nothing left for “the rest” that she is supposed to get.

7

The term to google here is “abatement”. That’s the process of reducing gifts in case the estate is insufficient to satisfy them all. There’s a hierarchy that determines the order in which different gifts abate.

8

A gift of property which is no longer in the estate fails unless there is a savings clause (Blackacre to John unless I no longer own Blackacre, then $100,000 to John). A cash gift doesn’t fail but the will must identify the order of the gifts.