The Expert Podcast

This is very good advice from The Wall Street Journal: hash out the inheritance now or fight with your family later. We are seeing so many cases of probate fraud and family law fraud; it's unbelievable. What's happening is a money grab, a cash grab. People in the younger generations have not had the same financial success as even their parents or grandparents, but even people one layer above them. The reason why is because the economy has changed in the last 20 years. We had the housing crash in 2008, we had a pandemic, and we had other recessionary pressures on people.

So what are they doing to try to get money? They want to get the inheritance. If your grandparents are boomers, you may look at them as thinking they have a house, money, or maybe a 401k. How can I get my hands on that money? And with the fact there's a lot of blended families—people get divorced, they remarry, they have stepchildren—there's a lot of ambiguity about this money.

What's happening is that when an older person in the family starts to become ill or dies, it's like a vulture. Everybody's trying to grab that money and sometimes doing it improperly. They're not abiding by the will; they're making people change wills; they're putting people into conservatorships to try to keep them from giving the money to somebody else.

So if you have a family with older people that have some means or some wealth—they don't have to be filthy rich but have some kind of money—start the process early. A couple things to recommend: make sure that anybody who's handling the estate is bonded; make sure you don't have an executor that could just do things with no consequence; make sure everything's in writing; and make sure there's regular reporting of the assets. It's not just left to chance.

On a daily basis, we talk to people whose family is breaking up over the fact that one person needs the money so badly because they're struggling that they're willing to threaten the relationship with their siblings or their other family members. They're willing to jeopardize the goodwill of that family because they want to get an extra $50,000 or $100,000 from the estate. Sometimes people are forging checks from their grandparents; quit claiming deeds on properties; they're forcing them to change their will.
Don't take it lightly because the people who have the wealth and the money—the grandparents, the parents—don't want this to happen. Respect their honor, respect their wishes, and keep harmony in the family by not letting one person or multiple people artificially divert money that doesn't belong to them.