Estate battle can lead to family war
Greg Kratz
The man died in 1968, without a will, and the antlers were still there in 1973 when one of his sons took them. The son's siblings knew he had taken the antlers, but they didn't think much of it at the time.
Years later, those same siblings ran across a newspaper article referring to the "world class" and highly valuable antlers their brother possessed. The siblings were angry and demanded the return of the antlers.
The son wouldn't budge.
The siblings hired an attorney and sued their brother.
He still wouldn't give up the antlers.
A judge heard the case and ruled that all seven children in the family had an equal right to the antlers because their father had left no will.
The brother still wouldn't give them up and ended up serving more than 10 days in jail for contempt.
All of which goes to show that siblings will fight over anything when it comes to a parent's estate.
But Les Kotzer, an estate planning attorney in Toronto, says it doesn't have to be that way.
When he goes on national radio shows, Les says, he hears the same concerns over and over again. People think their mother's will does not reflect what she really wanted because she was pressured by one of her children. Or one sibling is going to attack a parent's will, and other siblings want to know how to defend it. Or a beneficiary listed in a will can't get any information from the executor and wants to know her rights.
For some of you, such questions bring back remembrance of personal experiences. But these issues should worry everyone. Les says that, as more boomers, many of whom are spenders with debt, inherit from their Depression-era parents, many of whom were savers, such battles are bound to escalate.
"The first comment (we hear) is, 'This can never happen to us. We're not rich. We rent. We're employees, not employers,"' Les says. "We walk you through how this can happen to you. For example, does one child have a joint bank account with Mom, and the others aren't on it? Or there's a painting above Mom's fireplace, and everyone loves it. Who gets it when Mom dies?"
The new book starts with a list of 21 warning signs that a family war may be in your future. Then it moves on to a selection of real-life family war stories, like the antler tale related above.
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