We had another storm blow through last night, and our basement is soaked. We might get some more thunderstorms today, but I think the worst is over.
But I think it’s going to be a good day because my role as the executor of my late mother’s estate is nearly done — all accounts and goods have been liquidated and turned into money in a bank account, and got the final distribution of that money to all of the heirs, so I’m about to sit down and do the final steps: accounting. It’s the final chore, so that’s good.
Today I just have to write a lot of checks — Mom had too many kids, and they had too many grandkids — double-checking sums and making sure everything is correctly put into a ledger. Then that stack of checks gets bundled up and mailed to our lawyer in the Pacific Northwest, who will then create a Declaration of Reasonable Diligence and the Declaration of Completion that will need my signature, and then he sends a statement to all of the heirs that I have done everything correctly, which the heirs must then formally approve, and then, finally, the lawyer will send them the money. Then I am done!
That’ll be a relief, getting that burden off my shoulders. Sadly, it feels a bit like my mother’s legacy has been turned into a few numbers that will be dispersed to her descendants, and will then fade away.
Time to turn into an accountant for a day. This is about the last thing I would ever choose to do.
I was executor of my aunt’s estate about 12 years ago. She had no children so my 4 siblings and I were the only heirs. Even though she had no will, everything went fairly smoothly until it was time to divide the spoils. My oldest brother, who was a lifelong criminal, in and out of prison from the age of 16 until his early 60’s when he died, decided that I was cheating him. He began listing all kinds of shit that he “distinctly remembered” having been at my aunt’s house that he wanted to receive as a birthright for being the oldest. Among the belongings he imagined, a “very valuable” classical guitar, a violin that he claimed might have been a Strativarius and a coin collection that he believed was worth “at least a million dollars”. He said these things had belonged to our grandfather. To be clear, my grandfather was an Italian immigrant who worked all his life as a tailor. His tax return from 1961, the year before he retired showed an income of less than $5000. In reality, there was no guitar, valuable or not, I did find a violin in the attic but it was one of those undersized ones for children and may have been worth about $20 if it hadn’t had a big crack in the body. There actually was a coin collection, the whole family knew that grampa collected coins. 80% of it was probably change he had saved over the years beginning when he was a kid in Italy and throughout his career in his tailor shop. There was a hand written note in the box where they were stored specifying that his coins should be sold to pay for my college education. He died in 1967 and I didn’t go to college until the late ‘70s. My aunt probably never opened that box after he died or she would have definitely honored that wish. The rest of my siblings all agreed that the coins should go to me and I still have them now. I did an inventory of what’s there and came up with a roughly estimated value of between $2500 and $3000 mostly because there were a couple of books of Morgan silver dollars. Someday I think I’ll get them appraised for real. I’ll sell them and divide the money between my grandkids.
So far, I’ve managed to avoid any infighting by being extremely transparent, every step of the way, to the point everyone might be getting tired of all the texts I sent out.
We also had a small coin collection to dole out. When we had it appraised, it was worth about $100. That squelched any money grubbing.
I thought when I was a younger man that I had already passed the major milestones on the way to being “a real adult.” Education & career—that first job! Marriage. Parenthood. Advancing in the career during the middle phase, then retreating to “elder statesman and mentor” in my third act. Being a Grandpa would have been nice too, but that’s not in the cards.
That was pretty much it, I thought, until retirement.
But, no. The deaths of one’s parents have to be included in the rites of passage. Dad’s hit me hard, back in 1995. “You never get over it, but you do get used to it.” Mom died at 95 in 2020, about a month before the pandemic hit, which is good timing because it would have killed her just worrying about it.
It took my sister and I nearly four years to sort everything out, even though it was just the two of us, and the only thing in Mom’s estate was the house. But Jackie just couldn’t let go. I can’t imagine having to juggle a dozen siblings and even more nieces and nephews.
I’m sorry for your loss, PZ, but it sounds like your Mom picked the right executor. And congratulations on being nearly out of it.
Sounds like you are doing a great job of a not particularly enjoyable task. And of course your mom’s real legacy is not her material goods but her family and the people she impacted.
My grandfather was wealthy by local standards having built a business worth a couple of million dollars, and my father & his four siblings later squabbled over it until their interpersonal relationships where destroyed. Even when my aunt sickened and then died from cancer, two of them remained no contact and did not attend services. This blew my mind. I only have one brother and we’re not even especially close, and when I try to think of what it would take for me to estrange him in the face of impending death… it’s just absurd. It would have to be something truly egregious, and it sure as shit wouldn’t be money. Ironically, the legacy Grandpa built divided his family. And of course, they are all (loudly) professing Christians. Family values indeed.
My wife declined when her father asked her if she wanted to be his executor. She has a brother with a wife that is a pain in the ass. My wife prefers not to have contact with them. It will be worth the executor’s fee to not have to deal with them when the time comes.
My parents lived out their lives in a double-wide they put on a 2.5 acre lot a short distance from my brother’s house. He and his family took care of them and the property for years. When our mom died just as COVID was starting, the property went to him. The transfer may have already been set up that way by our mom who was very sharp with business stuff. In any case, I wasn’t going to object. My brother and his wife had earned it.
My mother-in-law (Jane) died in 2018. She left a sizable sum in her estate at the time of her death. She’d invested her funds very well. She also left a very detailed will. Half would go to my wife and the other half to her brother. There was no friction between them over the division. However, and this still leaves a bad taste in my mouth, our sister-in-law (let’s call her Linda) was lusting over every penny during Jane’s last few years. Every time Jane spent anything, Linda would grouse, There goes more of our money! She really lost it when Jane bought a new car at age 70. What does she need a new car for? Linda spat. My view was simple. It’s Jane’s money. She can spend it anyway she wants. She earned it, for crissakes. At the reading of the will, Linda pored over every jot and tittle. The pure, unvarnished avarice was something to behold. At the end, she was satisfied they’d gotten their fair share of the loot. I still don’t understand it. They were both doing quite well. I’ll admit that the free money was very nice to get, but it was really not life changing. Though our retirement fund was fluffed up nicely.
PZ:
As executor, I assume you have created an estate account to funnel any funds into, and then pay off any debts, with the balance being distributed in accordance with the will. I had the same role last year. One bit of advice: Make sure that you leave some money in that account. Things have a way of popping up later, like any money due for 2025 taxes (and tax prep fees).
The single most important factor in disbursing estates is the reasonableness of family members. Looks like you’ve got a great family. And they have a great executor.
(As executor, do you get to wear a black hood?)
Chrislawson @ 9
In Swedish, a synonym for executor was not ‘hangman’ but ‘skarprättare’ (approx.) ‘sharp executioner’ as the business was done with an axe (until the very last time in 1912, when Sweden had bought a guillotine to avoid the mess that might occur if the skarprättare was drunk).
The skarprättare wore a uniform with a peaked cap, as being a worker for the Swedish justice department. This made the postmen and the executioner have a similar look.
Myself, I prefer the traditional look of the executioner in ‘The King of Id’ cartoon.
Sounds like Minnesota is a bit more complicated than we found in Maryland when my father died. When my mother died first, we set up a living trust for my father that included a will — three kids, share everything evenly, simple. When he died the estate lawyer filed the will, and I never hear another word about it — I was the executor of my father’s estate and after liquidating everything I just divided up the money evenly and wrote checks to my siblings. No problem, and very inexpensive…..
One of the amusing bits of the process was to see that my father’s estate and will were filed with the “Orphans Court”! At my retired and elderly age I did not consider myself an “orphan,” though I realized that, technically, with no parents still alive I was an orphan for legal purposes.
It should have been simple. We had a will my parents had written (in 1985!) that simply said to divide all assets equally among their 6 kids. Simple, straightforward. Except how do you divide so many pieces of a rich life? We ended up just having all those kids go through the house and pick what they wanted, then had Habitat for Humanity and a contractor clear everything else out, and then sold the house, reducing it to a number of dollars in a bank account. Then the hard part was tracking down all of Mom’s financial assets — she was concerned about the future, which was reflected in her habit of opening all kinds of annuities, depositing money in various accounts that had to be searched down. closed, and drained into that single bank account.
It took time and effort. And it’s not as if I could just close my eyes to that $500 investment she had tucked as not worth bothering with, since an estate executor is charged with finding every penny to benefit the heirs with diligence.
I think I’m done now though.
I’m afraid, PZ, that you’re not done until April 16 of the third year after filing the final income-tax return, because the returns are subject to examination (including random checks unrelated to any “cause” or discrepancy).
That also goes for divorcees…
@12: Prof. Myers wrote “Mom had too many kids, and they had too many grandkids…” My apologies. I assumed from that comment that your mother’s estate was being left to grandchildren as well as children. But I know that the distribution of material possessions can be fraught — in the case of my father’s estate, we rented a storage unit, moved lots of ‘stuff’ into storage, and slowly over a couple of years us siblings poked around in it to see if there was anything (else) that we wanted. After a couple of years we just hauled the remaining things to the trash bins. I was also thinking of “a Declaration of Reasonable Diligence and the Declaration of Completion” which I did not have to have.