Under what circumstances would you disinherit a grown child? (childcare, meal, legally)
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For the sake of this conversation let's define grown as over the age of 27.
A friend is considering disinheriting her 33 year old daughter and she has every reason to do so but we started talking about what others would do.
A will is simply a legal instrument to distribute a person's possessions and wealth- It is not a declaration of love and I think many people get the two confused.
I would disinherit a grown child if
1) they had a gambling problem or addiction problem like drugs or alcohol and refused to seek or accept help
2) if I was reasonably sure he would give the money away to a cult or fringe group
3) if this child had demonstrated an inability to manage her finances or life in general
4) if this child had demonstrated or even said she did not want to be a part of the family anymore
5) if a child was already wealthy and other children needed inheritance more
6) if he was convicted of a crime and would be spending the rest of his life in prison
7) if a grandchild or sibling had catastrophic medical needs and bills
I know inheritances can be set up in trusts to dole it out piece meal over the life of the child. I think that would be better than a huge windfall at say 30 years old. It is also possible to change a will with a codicil or completely rewrite a will if circumstances really changed.
I do not believe in ruling from the grave but I also don't believe a person has an obligation to leave their wealth to anybody in particular.
I do agree. Our money will go to our two younger sons. Our eldest will get something of his fathers that he has always admired, but he had 8 years of private school education paid for, and has no need of our money.
People do need to be aware that you cannot just omit one child from your will, unless you specify that it was a deliberate choice.
Would anyone here disinherit a child who sucked up parents' resources his entire life, where the parents gave probably at the very least 100,000 over the years to support him and his children, so the other two who weren't leeches and took next to nothing from their parents through their lives could get a fair share? This is an issue somewhere in my extended family and I frequently think about it. I think this certain son deserves nothing more because he has been given so much throughout his life and has skated by on someone else's dime (the parents feel too bad for the grandkids, who are now legally adults but still living home, to stop the gravy train for their son who cannot get his life together despite numerous attempts to help) but apparently the parents are planning to split their estate 3 ways anyway, one for each child. Don't know how I feel about it, curious to see what others would think.
Yes he would need the money the most of the 3 kids however the parents have been enabling him his whole life by giving him money and essentially paying for him (not at all an extravagant lifestyle but he can get by barely working a low skill minimum wage job with two kids thanks to his parents' constant support for two decades). I don't know if it's fair for him to then get 1/3 of the remaining estate, especially when he will not help himself. I don't know what I would do if I were the parents in that situation, honestly. I personally don't like the idea of him still getting 1/3 but at the same time I imagine it would be very difficult emotionally for his parents to disinherit him.
I would never use money as a tool to punish a loved one. Everyone gets their fair share.
Interesting. You see it as entitlement and to not "fair share" as punishment. Again a will is not an instrument to show love or lack thereof. I'm sure there are many who feel the same way. I don't.
My FIL disinherited my husband because he wouldn't divorce me. Actually, he left him a dollar.
Unfortunately, he forgot to change the beneficiary forms for his life insurance and those superseded the will. He also didn't designate a beneficiary for his state retirement, so it went to my husband as his only child. So my husband still got the money. At least his dad had the satisfaction of thinking he had disinherited my husband.
a will is not an instrument to show love or lack thereof.
Why do you make this statement as though it is a fact. I think that most children of parents *when* sitting at the table during a reading of a will would feel differently than you.
Imagine sitting in a lawyer's office with your siblings and they each received an equal share and you got nothing or a lot less. Let's say there was no explanation. You wouldn't feel it was some sort of statement about how your parents felt about you?
We have a trust and a will. All 3 kids will receive an equal share (when they turn 60 years of age) no matter what. If we die when they are young, there are provisions about educational and medical expenses being paid for.
A will is interpreted as a "final accounting", if you will, of the parents' judgement on their children's lives and choices, no matter how much you might protest that "it's just a legal instrument." That "legal instrument" has been the cause of many, many siblings never speaking to each other again after their parents' death, because the parents' inadvertently played favorites, or did not discuss their reasoning for how a will was devised and left siblings feeling punished, slighted, ignored, judged and unworthy.
And parents often don't discuss their will, because they don't want to deal with the fallout, because they KNOW there's going to be hard feelings. They figure, "I'll be dead, not my problem any more." Whatever. If a parent feels strongly that they would prefer to give their money to an organization such as a church or charity, with only token bequests to children, that's their right, and they need to tell their family up front so that there are no surprises. But I don't think it's right to play favorites from the grave and start handpicking which kid gets how much. So the kid who did well, studied hard, made a career and made good choices and was successful gets ignored, while two feckless kids who dropped out of college, had a couple of kids out of wedlock with different fathers/mothers and whose longest period on a job was four months as a barista, get all the dough? Well, isn't that special?
I had one co-worker who said that they had divided their assets based on the number of grandchildren -- i.e., the son who lived nearby and had four children got twice as much as the son who lived 1,000 miles away and had two kids, and was upset because the out-of-state son had been upset when they told him. The logic was that the son who lived close by "needed" it more because he had more kids. Playing devil's advocate, I pointed out that they had already received many benefits from living close to Mom, in the form of free childcare (she was constantly leaving work early to pick up kids, having kids at her house overnight, and taking them for weekends when her son and DIL would go to a concert or away for the weekend), free meals (they ate at her house at least 3 nights a week), cars (she would buy them a car or have the old one repaired when theirs broke down "because they needed a car"), clothing (she loved to buy the kids' clothes), and vacations (she almost always went with them, and ended up paying the way, i.e., she paid for the condo and the park fees at Disney World for the 7 of them, etc.), and they were all on her cell phone plan (because it was "cheaper"). The son who lived out of state, on the other hand, paid for babysitters, their own meals, their own autos/repairs, etc. I asked her one time, when she had gone to the mall at lunch and was showing me some stuff she had bought for a local grandchild, "Do you send stuff to ____ all the time, too?" "Oh, no, they don't really need anything." That is going to be one ugly reading of the will . . .
Would anyone here disinherit a child who sucked up parents' resources his entire life, where the parents gave probably at the very least 100,000 over the years to support him and his children, so the other two who weren't leeches and took next to nothing from their parents through their lives could get a fair share? This is an issue somewhere in my extended family and I frequently think about it. I think this certain son deserves nothing more because he has been given so much throughout his life and has skated by on someone else's dime (the parents feel too bad for the grandkids, who are now legally adults but still living home, to stop the gravy train for their son who cannot get his life together despite numerous attempts to help) but apparently the parents are planning to split their estate 3 ways anyway, one for each child. Don't know how I feel about it, curious to see what others would think.
Yes he would need the money the most of the 3 kids however the parents have been enabling him his whole life by giving him money and essentially paying for him (not at all an extravagant lifestyle but he can get by barely working a low skill minimum wage job with two kids thanks to his parents' constant support for two decades). I don't know if it's fair for him to then get 1/3 of the remaining estate, especially when he will not help himself. I don't know what I would do if I were the parents in that situation, honestly. I personally don't like the idea of him still getting 1/3 but at the same time I imagine it would be very difficult emotionally for his parents to disinherit him.
I have read about parents who have kept track of all unpaid loans and have had those subtracted from their estate when they die. But often the parents that have the "con artist" adult children who "bled them dry" continue to enable them after death by splitting the estate equally between all of their children, or even giving their entire estates to the dead beat children because they "need it more".
Frankly, I think that it is wrong to enable dead beat children whether you are alive or dead. Don't give in to lazy, selfish children when you are living & don't give them your entire estate when you die because they "need the money" and your successful children do not "need the money".
It is a completely different situation if one of your children is disabled or has serious health needs or something like that. In those cases, IMHO, a parent should help them financially, both before and after death, if they are able to do it.
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