We were recently at a seniors’ event talking to people. A middle-aged woman in scrubs came up (I’ll call her Nancy). She worked nearby and heard about the event. She had a question, so she thought she would come over. Her question was how she could get her dad and stepmother back together.
Her question sounded more like a marriage counseling question than a legal one, but just the same, I asked her to explain. She said that her dad (let’s call him Howard) and stepmother (we can call her Mildred) had been together for over 30 years. She never said what happened to her mother, but since she spoke warmly of her stepmother, I assumed there wasn’t a divorce. Divorces usually leave a bad taste.
Her dad had run a neighborhood laundromat for years. It must have been fairly successful in its heyday, but sadly, it wasn’t generating much income anymore. Howard had let the building deteriorate. Now they needed to sell it.
Howard and Mildred had lived near the laundromat, but as they got older and as the neighborhood deteriorated, Nancy decided to move them into her home. This is when the problems began. All of a sudden, Mildred’s children (Nancy’s stepsiblings) decided to get involved, although they had never been involved before. Nancy moved Howard in with her, and one of her stepsisters moved Mildred in with her.
As with many small business owners, Howard hadn’t put much money into a retirement account. Any profits they had earned over the years had gone into a joint bank account. Over time, it had grown to a respectable out. However, once Mildred moved in with her daughter, Nancy noticed the account balance going down pretty rapidly. She heard from people in her father’s old neighborhood that there was a lot of work going on at the stepsister’s house. Lots of trucks.
And Howard missed Mildred. He would call her as often as he could, but the stepsister was always right there. They could never really talk. Howard wanted Mildred to come live with him, but the stepsister always had a reason to say no.
Since the bank account money was rapidly disappearing, their last remaining asset of any value (and it wasn’t that much) was the laundromat itself. It was held in joint names, and Nancy was concerned that if they sold it, Mildred’s share would disappear pretty quickly. Howard has several legal avenues to consider, but none of them are guaranteed, and they are all pretty expensive. Sadly, Howard had an apparently unsolvable dilemma.
Of course, with a little planning, they could have avoided some of these problems. If Mildred had appointed Howard (and then Nancy) as her attorney in fact, they could have controlled the situation. The money would still be around, and Howard and Mildred could have lived out their lives happily. Hindsight is often 20/20.
Give me a call if you want to talk.
