Preparing for death

[micropolitan guy]

We redid our family trust completely several years ago, since Micro Jr. was no longer a minor. Time and money well-spent.

 

[Woody Long]

I'm only in my late 40s, but as someone who has a law degree and had a friend die unexpectedly while going through a divorce with a special needs child, I insisted that my wife and I get our wills done when our second child arrived. Similarly, with parents in their 80s, I'm on top of where everything is for them and what they want when the time comes. As my Wills and Estates professor would say, "It's not a matter of 'if'. It's a matter of 'when'." Better to be ready than not.

 

[dixiehack]

My brother is married with five kids and rents a house one exit down from my parents. When the topic of them passing has been broached before, I’ve indicated I’m good with my brother getting their house. They’ve helped me plenty over the years and I was never interested in moving back there.

It came up again a year ago after my Aunt Pam died intestate and mom hemmed and hawed when I mentioned it. Turned out not long after the funeral my brother got jailed for selling pills. (Amazingly he only drew probation.) So I don’t know if they are worried he will squander it or if there is still a mortgage on the place even after they downsized from the previous house and they think he won’t be able to keep up payments.

If they do ultimately deed it over to him I’m at peace with it. But if they do have us sell and split the proceeds, I’ll just set up something to pass any money along to my kids.

 

[jackfinarelli]

Absolutely necessary action for everyone. You should probably use an attorney to draw up documents; at the very least, use one of the online cookie-cutter legal services to help you with the documents.

There is a product you can buy that will help you get everything in order because it will prompt you to get organized. It is called a NOKBox where NOK stands for "Next Of Kin". It keeps everything related to your estate in one place so it can be discharged in an orderly fashion. My wife and I have found it useful.

 

[ChrisLong]

This thread is probably the nudge I need -- I have thought that if I keeled over tomorrow, my wife wouldn't even know how to pay the monthly bills.
We do have a living trust that we did with a lawyer maybe 15 years ago, everything to our one and only child. I have set up pre-paid death arrangements for my wife and I so there is only one phone call required (an 800 number available 24-7-365) to get us from body retrieval to cremation. The only extra fee would be if the body is more than 100 miles from the crematorium. I think those are two significant things that are done. But I have done a lot of stuff on my own. My wife and kid might know about it, but won't know where keys or documents are.

My Dad, who died in 2013 at age 96, kept meticulous records. But he was proud to never having owned a computer and he wrote out everything in journals and on envelopes. The biggest problem was, he had the worst handwriting in the world, so deciphering his scrawl was a challenge. He told us where a fireproof case was stashed away in his house that had important papers and $1,000 in cash should there be an emergency. When we retrieved it, there was an envelope with $1,000 .... and another envelope with $1,400. Dad's "fun" was checking the CD rates in the newspaper and moving his money around to get the best rates. After he died, my brother and I found the journal that had all of the investments and their maturation dates written in it. We spent a day going from bank to bank, trying to recover what he had invested. A teller at one of Dad's banks was slow in finishing the paperwork. I looked at him and tears were streaming down his face over Dad's death.

This thread has given me a lot to think about.

 

[BurnsWhenIPee]

Did an Amazon search and they have a ton of these products - hardcover, spiral-bound and appear to be pretty all-encompassing, with pre-printed pages and lots of blank ones.

There's one titled, "****! I'm dead! Now what?" Think my kids would appreciate that one as much as any.

Thankful to have the wills, living wills, powers of attorney all done and buttoned up, and this seems to be the logical next step.

 

[Driftwood]

I am thankful in that I am an only child, so any decisions about my mother will be mine and mine alone (with input from my wife). I have full POA for her in all matters legally and medically.
I am thankful that my wife and I don't have any children, so I hope the last check whichever one of us writes bounces.

 

[swingline]

That’s my Mom to a T. She never wants to get rid of anything, to the point of where my wife and I believe she’s a hoarder. Not as bad as on TV (no dead animals around, for instance), but still fairly bad.

A few years back, we tried to get her to get rid of some stuff, arguing that Dad was having heart surgery and would need to be able to move around. That was a few weekends of emotion (really Mom, you want to keep this filthy telephone cord?), and we did get rid of some stuff. But now there’s more.

My wife reminds me that at some point, we’re going to have to be the ones to clean out the house. I tell her that I’d rather do it after both of them are gone because while I know it’ll be difficult, I’d rather avoid devoting my parents’ limited days to emotional battles over junk.

Burn it down and walk away.

 

[User 149557]

I really knew I was marrying a lawyer when I was signing a pre-nup a week before and a will two days after our wedding.

 

[Baron Scicluna]

Burn it down and walk away.

Nah. I’m debating what to do with it once they’re gone, including possibly renting it out. Rents are sky-high in my town. If I feel like being a landlord, I could make some good money.

 

[swingline]

You can't really pay a company to clean it because there might be treasure buried in there among leaning towers of old newspapers, styrofoam from packages of meat and used aluminum foil.

 

[Batman]

I am thankful in that I am an only child, so any decisions about my mother will be mine and mine alone (with input from my wife). I have full POA for her in all matters legally and medically.
I am thankful that my wife and I don't have any children, so I hope the last check whichever one of us writes bounces.

You might or might not know this, but I always remind people that the POA expires upon death. So if you're in a situation where a loved one is in declining health and you know the end is near, be sure to have all of the financial matters buttoned up tight before they're gone.

Ours was an odd situation, but we found this out the hard way.
My wife had POA for her father. When he died, we went to clean out his bank account with about $5,000 in it to help pay for funeral expenses, only to find out we couldn't access it because the POA had expired when he passed the day before. Control of it went to his wife, who had also been in the hospital — she'd had heart surgery and was basically comatose for several weeks — and she died the day after he did. Since she was the surviving heir, or whatever you'd call it, control of the account then passed to her wayward son that my wife does not like at all. It would've taken a lot of time and most of what was in the account to pay a probate lawyer to sort it all out, so we just walked away from it. Five years later, for all we know, it's still sitting there. All because we waited two days too long to pull it out. If we'd gone the day before he died, instead of the day after, the POA would still be in effect and we'd have had no trouble.

 

[Liut]

You might or might not know this, but I always remind people that the POA expires upon death. So if you're in a situation where a loved one is in declining health and you know the end is near, be sure to have all of the financial matters buttoned up tight before they're gone.

Ours was an odd situation, but we found this out the hard way.
My wife had POA for her father. When he died, we went to clean out his bank account with about $5,000 in it to help pay for funeral expenses, only to find out we couldn't access it because the POA had expired when he passed the day before. Control of it went to his wife, who had also been in the hospital — she'd had heart surgery and was basically comatose for several weeks — and she died the day after he did. Since she was the surviving heir, or whatever you'd call it, control of the account then passed to her wayward son that my wife does not like at all. It would've taken a lot of time and most of what was in the account to pay a probate lawyer to sort it all out, so we just walked away from it. Five years later, for all we know, it's still sitting there. All because we waited two days too long to pull it out. If we'd gone the day before he died, instead of the day after, the POA would still be in effect and we'd have had no trouble.

Very good reminder to us all.

 

[Driftwood]

You might or might not know this, but I always remind people that the POA expires upon death. So if you're in a situation where a loved one is in declining health and you know the end is near, be sure to have all of the financial matters buttoned up tight before they're gone.

Ours was an odd situation, but we found this out the hard way.
My wife had POA for her father. When he died, we went to clean out his bank account with about $5,000 in it to help pay for funeral expenses, only to find out we couldn't access it because the POA had expired when he passed the day before. Control of it went to his wife, who had also been in the hospital — she'd had heart surgery and was basically comatose for several weeks — and she died the day after he did. Since she was the surviving heir, or whatever you'd call it, control of the account then passed to her wayward son that my wife does not like at all. It would've taken a lot of time and most of what was in the account to pay a probate lawyer to sort it all out, so we just walked away from it. Five years later, for all we know, it's still sitting there. All because we waited two days too long to pull it out. If we'd gone the day before he died, instead of the day after, the POA would still be in effect and we'd have had no trouble.

I did not know that, but that's why every account my family owns has two names on it.

 

[outofplace]

My wife and I ensured we had everything in order years ago, but it probably makes sense to check again. We have only the one child, so if we were both suddenly gone, she would get everything.

We have seen examples of good and bad. Both of my wife's parents did this very well. Both of my parents screwed it up. My father had nothing written out, so his asshole of a second wife took everything. My mother had a will with everything spelled out clearly, but made the mistake of naming my older brother the executor. As I think I have mentioned before, he was a ****up and a drug addict, so of course, he stole most of the money. I spoke with an attorney about suing him. He told me he'd love to take the case because he likes winning and he would definitely win, but he thought I might end up wasting the legal fees because the money was probably all gone already. I don't doubt that he was right.

 

[2muchcoffeeman]

My mom left nothing for my brother and me to divide up after she died five years ago. From a certain point of view, that was good because we had nothing to fight over.

 

[Turtle Wexler]

Great thread.

We started here: https://getyour****together.org/

Then we used LegalZoom for wills, POA, medical directives, etc. Got those notarized. Didn't need to involve a human lawyer, but then again our affairs aren't complicated. You can also check with AARP or your state, which may have fill-in-the-blank forms.

Copies of those docs plus a big "read me" document with list of accounts, access instructions, etc. are in a shared Dropbox file. That file is shared with one family member on each side. We chose relatives of similar age to us who are responsible but don't care enough to do anything with that information before it is necessary.

One of our biggest motivators was to keep certain family members who we did NOT want involved in our affairs out of the process. We watched that get ugly with other relatives.

 

[swingline]

I have a car, a checking account, a Guild retirement account (about $135/month if I live long enough to collect it), a ton of books, some collectible cast iron banks and assorted **** they should just sell, including my guns and ammo. Term life insurance runs out in nine years, so I’m worth more to my kids dead than I am alive.

 

[micropolitan guy]

I have a car, a checking account, a Guild retirement account (about $135/month if I live long enough to collect it), a ton of books, some collectible cast iron banks and assorted **** they should just sell, including my guns and ammo. Term life insurance runs out in nine years, so I’m worth more to my kids dead than I am alive.

Swingline outed.

 

[swingline]

N N Now listen hair!