I prepared a trust-based estate plan for a client. I explained the benefits in avoiding probate—more privacy, less cost. He understood.
He was close to his elderly aunt who had never married. She had a sizeable estate. Her attorney had prepared a will-based plan for her. When my client, the nephew, talked to her about creating a trust, she told him that her attorney said trusts were not a good idea because you don’t have court supervision of the administration of a trust. I know I’m a little jaded after practicing law for as long as I have, but I have to wonder whether the attorney was also thinking about the sizable probate fee he hoped to get. In any event, the aunt did not do a trust.
Time passed, and sadly, the aunt died. When someone dies, all of their accounts and assets get frozen until an estate is opened. My client was named as the personal representative—the executor—and he came to me to probate her estate.
When you open a probate estate, among other things, you need to try to contact potential heirs. In this case, there was another nephew. No one knew where he was, and there was no record of him in the aunt’s address book or any letters or even Christmas cards. After some sleuthing, my client found an address for the cousin in a remote town in Minnesota. So, we sent him the required information, hoping that would be the end of it.
We weren’t that lucky.
The next thing that happened was that I was contacted by an attorney. He told me that he represented the Minnesota cousin. He said that his client had, in fact, been very close to the deceased aunt and called her regularly, although the phone records didn’t show that. He said that my client had taken advantage of the aunt and had her write his client out of the will. He demanded half of the estate.
I told my client that this was a nuisance claim, and he could throw some money at it to make it go away. He authorized me to offer $20,000. I called the attorney and offered $5,000, and he accepted. That was a small price to pay for what could have been a protracted and terribly expensive will contest.
If only the aunt had done a trust, we could have avoided all of that.
Call if you want to talk.
