The Expert Podcast

Man, I can't tell you how many times we hear the same story. It's like a broken record: a family is broken apart or has major conflict within it because of the estate planning or probate planning of that family. Sometimes it's even before an elderly parent dies or an elderly relative dies. There's assets out there, and look this day and age, a lot of baby boomers and older generations have assets and money. A lot of the younger generations, Gen Z and maybe Millennials, don't have as much in terms of financial security, so what they're doing is looking to grab those assets from the older generations, which may be more than their fair share. We're seeing what we call probate fraud exploding. We've talked about this before. Even before a person dies, sometimes relatives are circling around like sharks to grab assets, maybe to clean out bank accounts, maybe to quit claiming property in their name, maybe to put somebody in a conservatorship so they can get the money.

The number of times that we hear every single day family members saying, "I think somebody that's close to me—my brother, sister, aunt, uncle—is taking money from an older relative, but I don't know it's hard for me to believe it's true." Well, when we do the investigation, almost all the time we see that it's true—someone is taking money or assets. It's almost inconceivable to think that somebody would steal from their own family, but a lot of times it's out of desperation; they're either poor, they have financial problems, or sometimes they're just really not decent people. In some cases, it's because they don't think they're going to get caught, they don't think anybody's ever going to check, and they don't think there's going to be an investigation.

So if you're in a family where you have older relatives, grandparents, or maybe older parents, and you know the clock is ticking and somebody's going to die, maybe they're in hospice, maybe they're sick, start identifying and itemizing assets now because if you wait until the person's deceased, you may find that a lot of the assets are gone. They can still be searched and tracked down, but it's a lot harder to do then than it would be if you did it in advance.