Planning for Death, Disability, Divorce and Other Disasters
E-Book, Englisch, 230 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-09-839275-8
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
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1. You’re Gonna Die If I got a hundred dollars for every time I heard somebody say, “Here’s what happens if I die….,” I could’ve retired, a long time ago. It’s when you die, and no, it doesn’t matter if you’re a big shot or just a medium shot—you’re still gonna die. I’m a probate lawyer. I do wills, plan for death and disability and clean up what’s left when people die. If my job has taught me anything over the past forty years, it’s that life’s a sucker bet: Something’s trying to kill you, every stinking minute of every single day. Don’t get me started on roofers, tuck-pointers, circus performers or guys who feed tree branches into those buzzing mulching machines. The thing is, though, they all have reason to expect to get dropped, crunched or pulverized by the jaws of fate. But then, there’s this: I was once involved in reporting a case where a woman standing on a street corner was struck and killed by a falling stone gargoyle. The building ornament had been loosened from the crumbling skyscraper’s outer wall through a series of seemingly random events. A dental hygienist in an office with a window ledge above the gargoyle, started a small window-box garden. Dripping water from her garden seeped into the foundation holding the sculpted critter, although that alone would not have been enough to dislodge the gargoyle. Turns out, fertilizer and bird droppings from sparrows and pigeons feeding on the seeds in her garden laced the dripping water, so that corrosive mixture set loose the crashing sculpture. If random, unavoidable death weren’t bad enough, there’s the people who get fair warning: I know this accountant who was in a plane that crash landed on a runway, surrounded by fire trucks. He survived the crash, as did the rest of the passengers, but before he jumped on the escape chute he went back up the aisle for his carry-on, flight attendants screaming at him all the way. He barely made it off in time. When I asked what was in his bag, he admitted it was just dirty laundry, a pair of gym shoes and a half-eaten sack lunch. Then there’s the phenomena of people with money and power, who take crazy risks because they think that with their stature comes a suspension of the basic laws of physics. Private airplane pilots are some of the worst: I recall one such crash victim who had multiple funerals over the years, as picnickers located his assorted body parts, spread around in different rural hamlets. These last two folks are Death Deniers—grown adults who nonetheless think they’re never going to die. People like this are my biggest headache. Not just because they’re pretty silly—they’re all gonna die—but because there’s a symptom that comes with this phenomenon, an attitude I call, “God will balance my checkbook.” Put another way, Americans generally don’t do anything to plan for death, and as a consequence, their loved ones need to deal with their screwed-up estates after they’re gone. Me, I need to charge legal fees to their estates for mopping up these messes, and the families hate it. As one disgruntled survivor said: “I’d like to dig him up and kill him again.” This condition, what I call the Immortality Fallacy, may not be the only reason over half the adults in this country die with no wills and their lives in complete disarray, but I suspect it’s the grand prize winner. Maybe another reason unplanned death is so common is that many of the perps are unsophisticated, don’t get the legalities behind wills and estates and are just screw-up’s who don’t have their acts together. Sound like a reasonable assumption? Suppose there’s this guy, a well-connected, Been-Around-the-World kind of guy, but his personal finances are a mess. He’s got loans out to a bunch of deadbeats who haven’t paid him in years, owns real estate spread out in several states, some of it with no-rent squatters on it and the guy hasn’t cashed a paycheck in months. He’s got a spouse he knows may be profoundly disabled, who can’t handle money and his kids are not yet ready to so much as open a bank account. His business has been in shambles for years, he knows better, and yet he hasn’t got a will and he’s going to die with nobody lined up to manage his jumbled mess of an estate. One more thing: Suppose this guy is himself a lawyer, somebody who once drafted wills for clients. Wow, you’d think this guy must be a helpless putz, somebody who really needs to get his act together. Sounds right, except that what I’m describing comes straight out of the Report of Administration for the Decedent’s Estate of Abraham Lincoln, the most revered President of the United States, a man who steered the country through its most deadly war and freed the slaves. The hands-down greatest public figure in United States history died without a will and with a messed-up estate that took years to straighten out. And it wasn’t like he was a young man—Lincoln was fifty-six. While it may be no fair picking on an assassination victim for not having a will, Lincoln was, and remains, in good company. Most Americans are in exactly the same boat. Perhaps it’s emotional, superstitious hang ups about going to see a lawyer: When I was a kid, my Italian Grandmother used to carry a bunch of savings account passbooks in a shopping bag she hauled around everywhere. She had discrete, handwritten notes rubber-banded to those passbooks, spelling out who was supposed to get each account at her death. When I asked her why she didn’t just go see our neighborhood lawyer and do it right, she’d shake her head emphatically and say, “When you go to the lawyer, that’s when you’re gonna die.” I still hear that a lot. Seems like not much has changed since then. Why is this such a big deal? Because, dead people can’t own stuff. The dead can’t legally own property, so every county in every state has a probate court that takes control of dead people’s cars and money and houses, and the court hands it all around after you die. When you make no plans and die without a will, the court hands out all that property to a bunch of randomly-selected winners, sort of like the Lottery, although, in fairness, it’s a little less random. Musical chairs is more like it, where your death is when the music stops. That’s our first defined term, Intestacy, what happens to your property when you die without a will. It’s the state law that probate courts follow when they hand around your stuff to your close or in some cases distant relatives, if you have no will. The opposite, you choosing who-gets-what by signing a will, is called Testation. I’d argue that capitalism and the pursuit of accumulated wealth are almost meaningless, a life-long marathon run on a hamster wheel, if after working, striving and saving for decades you’re going to die without a will. Do that, and you let chance, fate and the thoughtless pseudo-will your home state intestacy law has drafted for you, decide what happens to everything you own. You shouldn’t take for granted the ability to give your stuff away at death: For centuries, the European ancestors of many Americans weren’t allowed to own anything. That was the privilege of the Crown. People who were willing to kiss Crown fanny and die for the King, were the only ones allowed to own some of the King’s property. Even then, though, Inheritance, the right to receive that property at death, was fixed by the King—he got to choose, and by law, he chose only men. Here in America, we weren’t much better. It was only about a decade before women got the right to vote that married women were finally “allowed” (by the men) to own property. States enacted so-called “Married Women’s Property Acts,” so a woman’s property no longer simply became property owned by their husbands, when they married. It‘s only been since the early 1900’s that all Americans were first entitled to draw up wills and leave their property to anybody they desired. Divisibility, the system where property gets freed up from dead-peoples’ hands and passed around at death, became a cornerstone of the legal fabric in America. It would be a stretch to say people fought and died for this right, but it didn’t come easy, either. Now, you get this really important choice about who will someday own all your stuff after you’re gone, but to make that choice, you need to do something. And, the choices are virtually unlimited when you make a will. In every state but Louisiana, you can choose to give your property to anybody, and to Dis-inherit anybody, the act of over-riding those state intestacy statutes with your own choices. That includes dis-inheriting your kids and even your spouse, although dis-inheriting spouses takes some extra effort in many states, and only works for half of your property in Community Property states, which are primarily most of the West and Southwest. How can I be so sure folks aren’t consciously choosing Intestacy, gleefully letting the state pick their beneficiaries? I’ve drafted over a thousand wills and trusts over the forty-two years I’ve practiced law, and during that time, not a single person I’ve seen has chosen to leave their property to the folks listed in the intestacy statute, in just the way the State does it. Why is that? Well, for one thing, Intestacy means outright ownership...
