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Yep. This just happened with my father's cousins. The four siblings had been left the lake cottage that had been in our family for five generations. One of the siblings wanted to preserve the cottage and the family history within, and three just wanted to sell and split the money. Sadly, the three took the one to court, and they won. They immediately listed the house and it was sold and bulldozed. It breaks my heart that the family cottage is gone. I'm just glad I was able to take my father one last time before he passed, and that he wasn't around when all that family history was destroyed.
The siblings don't speak anymore. The battle destroyed their relationships.
I agree it can cause problems ... thankfully mine is all sorted and hopefully when I leave this place they will be happy with each having shared equally.. the way my love for them has always been...
Leaving your house to your children equally is a recipe for disaster unless you require that the house be sold and the proceeds split equally. If you just leave the house, and 2 want to sell and the other 2 don't, they will end up in court, fighting each other. It happens all the time.
I told my Mom years ago to give my brother her house. He will need it a as place to live, and I don't want to argue with my wife over selling it.
Yup. If a person wants to make everything equal to their survivors, all the valuable stuff needs to be mentioned in a will as to how the stuff will be sold and divided. Just requiring the house's intentions to be sold with no mention of how the proceeds will be split up isn't enough to stop a fight.
That's true with other properties such as land, valuable collectibles or anything that's worth a lot of money. It also included intellectual properties such as, in Cash's case, the rights to his songs.
A very common impulse when writing a will is the desire to have everything that a person did or owned when they were alive to be carried on the same way after they die.
This is very common with farms now, especially family farms that have gone down through several generations of a family. Farming is a profession that is steadily losing interest in surviving children.
Once the kids in a family move away and don't become farmers, unless a will has instructions for the sale of the property, there's almost always a fight over the land, especially when one child remains physically close to the parents and the others don't.
But the same is true with other valuables as well. And there are always times when the children don't want the valuables to be sold or leave the family's holdings.
Intellectual property is especially hard to divide equally in terms of monetary value.
Something like a song can already have outside claims on it that are unknown by the survivors.
There have been many instances when an agent or a publishing company purchased the royalty rights for a small token in return for recording the song.
The young songwriter doesn't know or understand where the real money comes from yet, so $50 for the publishing rights sounds like a good deal until the song becomes a hit and collects millions in royalties. That all go to the person who owns the publishing rights.
It can grow even more complicated, as those rights can always be sold or traded. A 3rd or 4th party could be the owner when the songwriter dies.
Intellectual property can become very complicated, and complications will set off a fight among the survivors.
But trying to keep everything just as it was- intact- after a person dies is the most common mistake in writing a will.
I agree it can cause problems ... thankfully mine is all sorted and hopefully when I leave this place they will be happy with each having shared equally.. the way my love for them has always been...
Yeah, hopefully. No guarantees though. Death and inheritances do crazy things to people. Many a family has split because someone decided that "equal" didn't work for them.
Yeah, hopefully. No guarantees though. Death and inheritances do crazy things to people. Many a family has split because someone decided that "equal" didn't work for them.
Ive heard some mad stories too about families breaking up.. I know what you mean and true...I just hope my own family were brought up better... thanks for all your replies about this... I wast just digging at Cash.. I was talking about rich celebs in general who let their families down badly after death... I just feel for children who are forgotten...
I was talking about rich celebs in general who let their families down badly after death... I just feel for children who are forgotten...
So, this discussion has circled right back to the beginning again. His children weren't "forgotten". Some simply didn't receive monetarily equal portions. Again, why would you be privy to the reason any rich celeb arranged their affairs as they did? Rich or poor, famous or some unknown Joe Doaks down the street, unless a person dies intestate in the USA and some state probate court makes a determination about succession, no child of theirs is automatically entitled to someone's property after death, and they shouldn't expect to be.
So, this discussion has circled right back to the beginning again. His children weren't "forgotten". Some simply didn't receive monetarily equal portions. Again, why would you be privy to the reason any rich celeb arranged their affairs as they did? Rich or poor, famous or some unknown Joe Doaks down the street, unless a person dies intestate in the USA and some state probate court makes a determination about succession, no child of theirs is automatically entitled to someone's property after death, and they shouldn't expect to be.
You're mistaken.
Children ARE automatically entitled by our law as inheritors.
But they are in second place to the deceased person's wife or husband in our laws.
That makes things complicated when a man marries 2 or 3 different women over the course of his lifetime. Our law bases all inheritance on traceable accounts, such as marriage certificates. And the ages of the children make no difference in the line of inheritance.
So when a couple joins in a second marriage and both have children from their first they bring into the marriage, who gets what can easily become very tricky.
In Johnny Cash's instance, there was a lot of tangible wealth he left; he owned a large estate in Jamaica, an equally large estate in Tennessee, and owned most of the Carter family's properties in Virginia.
Along with a warehouse full of personal goods.
One of his guitars, a Grammar, not one of his favorites, was sold at auction for $131,000. One of his black Martin guitars could easily fetch close to $1 Million now.
The same is true with the stage costumes he wore, and all the paraphernalia he collected over his life.
And remember, his wife June died first, so he inherited everything she owned, which as almost as valuable and large a collection of stuff. One of her banjos sold for $80,000 a few years ago.
The Cash family enjoyed one of the longest careers in the music business, and they were international stars. Who knows how much of their wealth is still overseas in other countries?
Johnny probably didn't know how wealthy he was when he died.
But as much as all that was, his intellectual property- his recordings, the songs he wrote (or sang)- is much, much more valuable. Every time any of his songs are performed in public, they earn a royalty. Those royalties brought him multi-millions of dollars a nickel at a time while he was alive.
And they will continue to bring in that money for the next 100 years for the person who owns them.
You're mistaken. Children ARE automatically entitled by our law as inheritors.
But they are in second place to the deceased person's wife or husband in our laws.
The bolded depends on the state. Only Louisiana has forced heirship for children 23 or younger at the time of the decedent's death. All other states all a child to be disinherited. Children not specified in the will may be entitled to a share, ie, disinheritance needs to be specified in the will. This would be a phrase like "I leave nothing to my son Bob".
If the decedent dies intestate, then states have laws that determine how the estate is split.
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Originally Posted by hertfordshire
What if you had reason to believe that the money left for them would be used to support a drug habit? Or would go directly into the pockets of a controlling spouse? What if those children had been physically or emotionally abusive to you prior to your passing? Stolen from you? There are many reasons that people choose not to leave anything to their children.
But again, as someone pointed out, it's a moot point since he left each daughter $1M.
I would divide my money equally no matter what. Rejection from a parent in a will is your LAST GIFT to your children. Doing that creates acrimony and hatred.
One could drive a child to drugs or suicide through unequal treatment.
What about what his DAUGHTERS went through when he was on the road fooling around with June? Giving all of his children an equal amount would have been a healing gesture.
I would divide my money equally no matter what. Rejection from a parent in a will is your LAST GIFT to your children. Doing that creates acrimony and hatred.
One could drive a child to drugs or suicide through unequal treatment.
What about what his DAUGHTERS went through when he was on the road fooling around with June? Giving all of his children an equal amount would have been a healing gesture.
None of us knows how the inheritance decisions were made, or how they were discussed prior to death, and it's not up to us to second guess them.
I will note that Johnny Cash's daughter Roseanne is a star in her own right.
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