Beyond the Grave: the Right Way and the Wrong Way of Leaving Money to Your Children and Others

[lightreads]

Beyond the Grave: the Right Way and the Wrong Way of Leaving Money to Your Children and Others

3/5. A quick, plain language review of all the major estate topics – how to think about division, trusts, property, pets, second marriages, estrangement, etc. with an emphasis on the interpersonal and familial aspects of inheritance planning. I never took trusts and estates in law school, which I have come to regret. Particularly now that I'm probably going to need a living trust in the next couple years. Adulthood, what the fuck?

Yes yes, I realize that I actually read this book because my father Is dying and it was this weird free association sideways think way of coping with that, what of it.

Anyway, this is genuinely useful, if deeply heteronormative. And also just . . . weird? I mean, I shouldn't be surprised to discover just how tied up the notion of traditional family – and specifically blood relation – is with the passing of money. But boy. There are very few of the many, many anecdotes in this book that aren't about someone believing as a law of the universe that marriage and sharing DNA entail the intergenerational transfer of money, and any other arrangement is morally wrong. The intensity of this belief, the unthinkingness of it, it's just . . . weird to me.

Comments

[the_rck]

My mother, when she was studying for the Louisiana bar, explained inheritance law there to me, just a bit. Louisiana law is different from law elsewhere in the US, and up until recently, it was actually illegal to disinherit your biological children. When she talked to me, about ten years ago, it was illegal to disinherit a child under a certain age (29? 30? something like that), and it meant that, if she and my stepfather both died, my half-brother who was under that age would get two thirds of the estate while my sister and I might get one sixth each. (My sister and I were both a decade older and could be disinherited.) Joint property in a marriage is lifetime only in as much as a dead spouse's property must pass to their biological children when the other spouse dies.

[kate_nepveu]

Hence all the Golden Age mysteries about will construction.

. . . which is partly why I found Trusts & Estates so fun in law school, actually. The prof would write family trees up on the board and then vehemently X people out who'd died, very dramatic.

(To my pleasant surprise, I've developed a very minor specialty in it, because the New York State Attorney General's Office is the statutory representative of ultimate charitable beneficiaries of wills and trusts, so sometimes we appear in will contests, trust modifications, etc. I definitely wouldn't want to do it all the time, even if I could, because of the intensity of belief you mention, but I find it a nice change of pace.)