• 17
  • May
    2010

"Family, money and death are a combustible combination" -- Attorney Les Kotzer, author of Where There's an Inheritance...

Poorly executed wills can cause devastating family feuds. The survivors can end up spending enormous amounts on attorney fees in order to fight each other. They build up difficult-to-erase hard feelings and waste years distracted over the battles. It is all too common for entire inheritances to be eaten up by conflict over who should have gotten what.

Here are some tips on how to avoid future conflict:

  • Earmark the stuff. Your heirs may have feelings about your personal possessions that you are not even aware of. They may not be able to work out among themselves how to divide specific items. Family china, silver, portraits, collections, knick-knacks and other one-of-a-kind family items can be emotional flashpoints. More than one heir may feel entitled to a specific possession. Better to ask them now if there are things they would like to have, and make your decisions about who should receive those items. 
  • Name an impartial executor. Many parents choose their oldest adult child as executor, without considering whether one of the other siblings might be better equipped for the task. In any case, naming a child as executor may create resentment in the other siblings. Naming all children as co-executors can create deadlocks. It may be better to appoint an outsider: a trusted family friend or a private fiduciary.
  • Consider how your estate may change. The poor economy has provided a painful lesson: your estate may be smaller when you die than it is today. (Of course, it could be bigger also!) Say you had a $500,000 estate and you set aside $100,000 of it to go to charity, with the remainder to go to your children. What if, as the years went by, the estate shrank to $101,000? You would give $100,000 to charity, and $1000 to your children. It is going to be important to set up the will to do what you want regardless of how circumstances change.
  • Beware of unintended consequences. A woman left money for the care of her beloved dog, with the remainder going to her brother when the dog died. The brother killed the dog and collected the inheritance. It is safe to say that this was not the intended consequence.

Source: Orlando Sentinel, "Estate planning averts family feud" May 2, 2010