My mother’s house just went on the market, which meant the asking price has gone public. As part of the probate process, the names of all of the heirs were publicly posted a while back. There are skeevy people who are tracking that kind of information, who instantly swoop in and contact the heirs, asking if they’d like a fast advance on their inheritance, for the price of a small, tiny, hardly even mentionable fee, so small that they don’t even mention it, and you won’t know about it until after the estate is settled.
It’s like a payday loan scam run by funeral-chasing ghouls. I think I’ve just learned about a whole ‘nother industry full of people I hate.
My whole family is about to get junkmail from these horrible people who promise painless advances on their inheritance, except for the big bite they take out of it (one company was going to skim off 20%) and the nuisance to the executor (me) and his lawyer. I’m just telling everyone to be patient, we’re making good progress on the estate, and I’m hoping we can get everything cleared up by Christmas, so I only have one complicated tax year.
(In good news, we’ve already had 3 people tour the house, so maybe it’ll go fast.)
Although only a few people have toured the house, I wonder if there’s already a noticeable profile of the average person buying houses in the area. You have to be relatively well-off to consider buying a 400k plus home. I hope the people touring are actual families or people intending to live there rather than those looking for their second summer vacation or Airbnb investment or anything else like that.
Seems an increasing proportion of the human species have adopted the role of parasite in the human ecology.
This is why you want to set up a trust. It won’t go through probate. And you by-pass all that stuff going public.
Long story short, I was not the executor (initially, but that’s the rest of the story!). My wife and I spent a week at my Dad’s house getting it ready to put on the market. Cleaning, painting, etc. Finally, it looked good. The executor sold it at “price immediate,” it was snapped up in a week and the new “owners” gutted the place, tarted it up and resold it at a huge premium. I don’t often think about the week we spent there polishing the place, but the rest of the story did involve lawyers, alas.
I hope the sale goes quickly. It took over a year for my parents’ place to sell, which was a real source of stress and frustration for my mum, who move into assisted living to be near my dad in care. There was nothing for her to do, but that didn’t matter, and being right after the peak of pandemic property boom made it feel like the value of the house was seeping away every month it wasn’t sold.
It really wasn’t that bad — she now has enough money to keep her well looked after until is until she well past the century mark, if she gets there — but the psychological toll of selling their home of 37 years was quite significant.
So I’m not surprised there are sharks in the water around the estate house sales, add in a little financial desperation and people are well primed to listen to their pitch.
A childless aunt of mine died a few months ago and I have been named in the will along with a half-dozen siblings and cousins. We have no idea how much we’re getting, but it could be relatively substantial, and that’s been dragging on because there was a house to sell there too. For me, anything would be a bonus, but one of my cousins — likely the most in need of shoring up his retirement fund — emailed the lawyers handling the estate asking how much longer it would take. He got a very terse reply essentially saying it will take as long as it takes, and that any further communications on the subject would only add to their fees, hence reducing the inheritance.
I will be sure to let everyone know if my share turns out to be worth more that the price of a Musky vote for Trump in Pennsylvania…
(It’ll probably just be a few thousand at most, but a man can dream of flying across the pond in premium economy, can’t he? :)
[IAA(R)L who once upon a time practiced consumer-finance law; this is general commentary and not legal advice for any particular person or situation.]
@3: First, a terminology issue. No matter what the dorks trying to sell cheap self-help books loaded with dubious general advice (and their friends/alternate personalities selling expensive tailored estate-planning services) claim, it all goes through probate. It just may not be a contested probate, or a probate tax situation — but it’s all part of the probate system, there will be court filings and stamps and such. That’s virtually guaranteed when there’s real property involved and there’s no surviving spouse, even with most estate planning that doesn’t involve (expensive to operate because there are annual things to do) a during-lifetime transfer to a trust that has a proper structure. A court will still need to sign off on a transfer of real property when the seller isn’t, like, alive. So even without having to appear in front of a judge for a hearing, the estate goes through probate; it may be cheaper and simplified, but it’s not avoided.
The vast majority of trusts don’t have a proper structure to avoid any probate proceeding. They are instead optimized for both certainty of passage of title and minimizing the tax bite(s) (there are at least four that may be at issue — for sufficiently large estates, federal and state estate taxes; if it’s an at-death transfer to a trust, in most of the country a transfer tax that can be waived if a surviving spouse is a sole beneficiary; and if it’s a pre-death transfer to a trust, the trust may have to pay income tax on imputed income at the same time that the “owners” lose the ability to deduct interest and other costs). Trusts can be an appropriate tool, but they’re not a general get-out-of-probate-free card.
@5 (continuation and skepticism): The probability that there will be an acceptable offer, assessment, inspection, financing, and closure before the end of this year — given that we’re into November — is vanishingly small… except, perhaps, if it’s sold to a slightly different species of parasite. And some of them are operating in Western Washington as I type this (just saw one of their “postcard solicitations” earlier in the week; I had fun trolling one of them by phone a few years back while recovering from surgery, but I have an exceptional vicious and sick sense of humor that was enhanced by postoperative medications).
But it’s not all doom and gloom on the income-tax front. PZ has indicated that this house has been owned for a looooooooooong time (since before his mom turned 55), implying that the mortgage has been paid off, too. What that means is that a substantial part, and perhaps all, of any profit that may be recognized in 2025 from sale of the house will be excluded from income tax. Since Washington has no state income tax, that won’t be a problem, either. (One consequence of that: I escaped one school district to the north at approximately the time PZ escaped from K-M, and funding for the schools suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucked because it was all local property taxes.)
Death is hard, sorry
@ alll
Be nice
Yeah, I’m looking ahead to all the legal stuff I have to do to sell the house — I will be happy if we get a solid offer by December, but then there’s all the arrangements that have to be be made afterwards will probably push terminating this whole thing into the next quarter.
Also, there are ways to postpone probate. When my father died, he had a community property agreement with my mother that simplified everything at that time — they didn’t do the whole probate rigamarole at all. But now that my mother has died, it all came back at me. My lawyer had to dig up all this documentation from 1993 and we basically did my father’s probate now — I’ve got my father’s death certificate and all these other official legal documents as part of my mother’s probate package. Wheee!
What, you think there will just be junk mail? Not like you to be so cheerfully optimistic.
The number of phone calls I got from these lowlifes after my wife died cannot be represented by standard mathematics. Fucking vultures.
Sorry, I believe I just insulted the hard-working vulture population. I’ll try to be more inclusive in the future.
After my dad died I was working through all the paperwork with my mum. They had their mortgage with one of the major Canadian banks. After doing the rest of the stuff with the bank, they made us meet with a mortgage specialist. This person said my mum couldn’t continue to hold the original mortgage, and tried to make her roll over into a new mortgage at a much higher rate right then and there. It was essentially a product for high-risk loans because she had “no job” (she was retired). I refused to let her sign anything, and waited to meet with her lawyer, and checked with my accountant and financial guy. It was a lie. The senior mortgage specialist with a major bank was trying to rip off my mother a week after dad died.
I am a retired former lawyer in Washington State, my practice focused on real property, including property issues in probate and bankruptcy. Since I am retired, my advice is as worthy as your hairdresser.
Probate in Washington is far simpler and cheaper than many states, like California. The push to use a trust rather than a will and probate made sense in CA, and then traveled up the coast to Washington, but here it is mostly a solution without a problem. In CA, the base fees of the executor are set in statute as a percentage of the total estate value, not so in WA. One estate I probated had most of its value in WA, and one small parcel of land in CA. Cost more for the ancillary probate in CA than for the total of what we did in WA.
Hang in there, the house will sell and it will end.
@13 approving followup:
Thanks. There’s another issue with trusts hinted at here: Except if one is a legal resident of California or Tennessee† (and often even then), “a trust” is the wrong structure for an estate in which the value of intellectual property (copyrights, trademarks, patents, and related aspects like “residual rights”) is a significant portion of the estate — and especially so if it exceeds the anticipated profit on real property, or the estate is intended to pass to a non-tax/common-law-favored set of heirs (like nephews and neices if there are no surviving spouse or children), or the decedent has ever been in a bankruptcy proceeding or obtained any assets as a consequence of someone else’s bankruptcy proceeding.
Trusts are just like social media: Someone else is benefiting from their vaunted facial convenience, even if you can’t immediately trace down who it is or how they’re benefiting. The “trusts” department of major profit-seeking financial institutions isn’t there as a charitable service; even leaving aside their fees, they get significant benefits (even though “deposits” are for deceptive accounting purposes treated as “liabilities”) from their roles as holders of assets. (And worse yet, those advocating for trusts do not need to be lawyers and are often utterly unaware of anything other than immediate tax bites, or their fees and other benefits — like what happens when a trust is improperly established or administered.)
tl;dr Trusts are not a general-purpose estate-planning tool to be used without regard to the entire situation. Many times they can be simple; many times, not so much, and “not so much” means “ignore advertising touting them as all-purpose tools.”
† You. Do. Not. Want. To. Know. (Although it is related to Elvis… in both states…)
@2 nomdeplume
I have, on occasion, considered the rather frustrating possibility that this is what happens when society fails to change, due to the rich and their demand everyone “must work” (albeit only for them, not themselves), but our own inventions have increasingly created methods of reducing the amount of work necessary to do anything. Even we, us, the people on our side, scramble around trying to prevent machines from taking jobs, automation (even when the existing system fails at other possibly in some cases more important things), etc. We seem to be unable to adjust, and in case of the rich, who profit off all of us feeding them money while doing “work”, yet ironically would be just as happy is their where less of us doing so, and taking some of that money for doing it. As we edge closer and closer to something like the joke in one of the latest Star Trek: Lower Decks episodes, of having replicated almost everything, and a post scarcity society, I instead see something happening like the Far Zenith from Horizon: Forbidden West – a group of immortal rich people, who have managed to create a post scarcity system only for themselves, and only bother to genetically clone “extra people”, on the rare occasion they need them for something their automation can’t do for them. Sure, there are some examples of this not happening, like programs to help the poor, suggestions that maybe we really should make sure everyone has food, shelter, and maybe also a cell phone, even if they don’t have a job, but trying to even get “that much” going is heavily apposed. And those things, by themselves, would be a massive improvement, but it wouldn’t even begin to end the “rich” trying to stop paying into it, and arguing those people, even if they have problems that result in them not being able to, “needing to get job”. Heck.. there was a vid a bit ago from some guy that does a language thing on Youtube. He recently went to China, to live there for a while, in a small province, where his wife is from. Is everything China does with respect to people’s rights ranging from horrible, to bad, to just purely dubious? Yep, but he went to a freaking mall there that has everything from a restaurant in which they use robots, not a “replacements” for people, but as a way to provide people with disabilities to work from home as hosts and waiters (this is brilliant, imho, but imagine actually trying it in the US…), to real day care facilities in it, to arcades, which almost no longer exist in the US any more, to, admittedly crappy, no one would be allowed to keep animals like that in the US, “zoo” inside. So, yeah, even the stuff they do is crappy, when they do it, but we barely have malls any more, and seem to have utterly given up on trying to make them anything worth going to, while their mall looks like you walked into a flipping space station from 200 years in the future. Oh, and their restaurants literally have signs outside to the effect, “If you are in financial need right now, talk to one our staff and they will see about getting something for you. Hopefully this will help you get back on your feet and you can afford it next time.” Most places in the US, even if they wanted to do this, would either be swamped with people that need it, and have to close, or just couldn’t afford it in general (at least unless it was a major franchise). And, imagine having one, even one, single, franchise even offer such a thing, in all locations, and repay some tiny slice of the loss back to the franchise owner for doing it… Yeah.. not going to happen.
Oh, on the automation thing – ports, to some extent, wanted to automate some things just so it was faster, less time consuming, and didn’t require significantly increasing the number of people that could be bribed, lazy, or otherwise unable/unwilling to actually inspect incoming cargo – a problem that has gotten increasingly worse). You need highly trained, loyal, well paid, people, with strong ideals, who can’t be easily bribed, to do this stuff, and time and time again we have seen either they are not being paid enough to remain loyal, or are not always ethical enough to do their jobs right, and do get bribed to let things through, misplace them, etc., and some of the people bought out are “federal inspectors”, while the amount of cargo they have to deal with daily only grows, we are not opening more ports, or requiring less cargo per ship (and thus needing more ports), but the solution, because, again, everyone needs freaking money, and no one wants “automation” to take jobs is to either not hire any more people at all, or grow the number of people you do hire for it, even if you pay them more, over work them more, and ultimately just multiply the problems, instead of solving them. So.. yeah, I can see a legit reason for wanting to include some means to speed things up, reduce points of failure/corruption, and make it more likely that everything is properly inspected, and nothing gets snuggled through. The existing process does none of those things, and has been failing for a while now, but.. in typical “Far Zenith” thinking – don’t talk with the people that do the work about what is going on, why its a problem, why just hiring more people isn’t going to ever solve it, and “together” find a way to involve more technology to solve it, recognizing that yeah, this will almost certainly, “have to” involve some level of automation to fix it, but on the worker’s terms, and with their help – nope, instead lets just come up with the most efficient system the rich can pay someone to invent, take no account of what this will do to employment, and then drop by one day and say, “So… here is what you want to do to fix these things, and, yeah, afraid it might mean we need fewer of you to do it when its all over.”
Sometimes.. doing it without a person involved “has to happen” – like how no one freaking manufactures a bloody computer chip any more, and hasn’t for years, because you just can’t do it reliably, or at all, on the size scale we now do so, and a lot of the design isn’t either, because its freaking absurd to spend years hand designing a chip’s internals, when we already know how most of it needs to work, and its only 10% of the thing that needs to change significantly to add features, but that still may require relocating whole sections of the rest, and how they connect, to do so. Its not just faster, but more reliable, with some noted exceptions, to have a program do most of it. Or, no one in their right mind thinks we should keep risking human lives in some environments, and/or doing certain jobs, because doing so is high risk, gets people killed, etc. Its not just about “saving money”, its about not subjecting people to situations that are either a) too dangerous, or b) not even possible for a person. Yet, we still subject ourselves to some of this crap (coal mining, for example), not just because we haven’t build something yet to do it for us, but because we have this damn dual problem of 1) its still profitable for someone to do it at all, and 2) it would end entire small towns if we just stopped, never mind that they are, in the long run, doomed anyway.
So.. We don’t use it when we should, we do use it when its merely convenient, and even the people effected often, for very personal, possible financial, reasons, can’t sometimes tell the freaking difference. And, the only people that come out on top, regardless of if its misused, or necessary, are the rich.
Its all just.. WTF are we doing?
@ pz
Just be patient with yourself, you will get it all figured out.