I recently finished an estate administration where the Decedent was a gentleman who’d always had a plan.  Everybody who knew him said that he always did things himself, his way, and made it work.  Every time.  His estate plan was no exception, or so he thought. 

            The man worked hard his whole life.  He never had time for a family, so he had no wife or children.  He had one brother, who he never really got along with, and hadn’t even seen in 20 years.  Like everything else in his life, he made his own family.  Friends, co-workers, fellow churchgoers… they became his family.  He lived his whole life surrounded by “the family he chose”.

            When it came to his estate plan, he wanted to make sure that his chosen family were all taken care of.  So, he sat down and typed out a list.  He gave away a little over $80,000.00 to 15 of his closest friends, with everything else he owned being split equally between his church and the university he had graduated from.  Always following his lifelong mantra of “if you want it done right, do it yourself”, our man didn’t just trust that his instructions would be followed when he died.  Instead, he put the money for his friends into a safety deposit box, along with his list.

            Eventually like all of us will do, the man died.  His friends tried to get their inheritance out of the safety deposit box.  He’d told them all about his plan.  When the bank refused to let them into the box, they sought Court help.  So, I was appointed to administer the man’s estate.  I was allowed to access the safety deposit box.  However, when I did and found the list, it was not possible to follow it.  Why?  Because the formalities that are required for a document to be considered a Will were not followed His list was not legally something that could be followed.  Instead, the man was considered to have died intestate (without a will).

            Instead of giving away his considerable fortune to his friends, church and university, his family got it all.  Earlier, I wrote that he had a brother that he hadn’t seen in 20 years.  It turns out the brother had died shortly after the last time they spoke, so he’d been dead for eighteen years.  The brother had a daughter, but she’d died too about ten years ago.  She had two children, and even though they’d never met our man, they equally split an inheritance of over $800,000.00, because they were his closest surviving relatives.  The money went into a Guardianship for them, because they were minors at the time they inherited it.

            This situation could have easily been avoided, and our Decedent’s wishes could have easily been honored with just a simple Will.  Instead, he attempted to do it himself and save about a thousand dollars.  The result was a plan that failed to meet the requirements for a legally binding Will.  Instead of his chosen family and the special places to him receiving his money, two people he never met got it all.  Well, not all of it, because an attorney (me) got a large chunk of it as well for doing the work to give it to those two strangers.  The moral here:  Sometimes it’s better to trust the experts, especially when the consequences for not doing so are high.