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And the beat goes on. Someone, a family group will be dividing the income among themselves.
Posted on 11/16/2023 5:08:22 AM PST by where's_the_Outrage?
An Alabama woman is being kicked out of her longtime home as investors are looking to buy the 40-acre plot from her family, which could be worth upwards of $20 million.
Corine Woodson, 84, has been living in the same house on the outskirts of Auburn for over 60 years and is forced to leave the residence because the house sits on land with shared ownership throughout her family.
“I would like to ask them why. You know, why, but I don’t. I can’t figure it out. Thinking about it, wondering about it. It’s not easy. I can tell you that,” Woodson told WTVM.
The land is part of a 40-acre plot designated as heir-property, family-owned land that is jointly owned by dozens of family members, where no one has any specific land, just a percentage of the ownership.
Woodson came to live on the land through her late husband, whose father purchased the land in the early 1900s and has since passed it down through multiple generations of the family.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Now with "dozens" of people that own percentages it is a big mess. Chances are several of the "owners" have no real family ties to Corine and just want to get money for their inheritance.
It is a really bad idea.
Sounds like a story that can be corrected with a big check and a rental property with hired help from the widow. You hear these news stories, you never hear about the settlement.
It seems like a form of socialism. Too bad for her, she’s lived on that land a long time.
This was after friends and associates of their had spent years imploring them to get their affairs in order and do some serious estate planning. Their response was always: “This is all family. We don’t need that expensive legal sh!t.”
I guess not. Morons.
Her share of $20M will get her a nice independent living condo, unless her family fleeces her. If I were she, I’d get my own attorney.
We just went through something similar with a piece of property owned by multiple members of my FIL’s family. My BIL did yeoman’s duty getting it all sorted out, with some help from my wife. My wife had often said she wanted no part of it, didn’t care about any value there that might be hers, it was all such a giant mess. I agreed.
I saw a case where a 1,000 acre property was being sold by the heirs of the original owner. There were 12 heirs. They all lawyered up. It took 3 years to close the sale because of all the division. The lawyers made out pretty well on that one.
Ridiculous, misleading headline.
I don’t understand why this is even worth posting.
My buddy was the youngest of nine kids. The father bought a summer house on a lake in NH. When he and the mother died, the property went to the kids in equal shares. It set off a ten year civil war that rent the family to pieces. Very sad.
It’s always about the Benjamins grandma.
This is common in FL. The surviving wife lives on the property and the heirs want the money from the property. My woman (possessive) provides nursing services to a 90+ y.o. widow in a similar. Her children live in nearby developments and keep trying to cash her out. The woman and her husband built the house she lives in on a large, attractive parcel of land. Her children keep finding pretexts to move her out to assisted living facilities in Pinellas county and have her declared incompetent. The woman still has her faculties and fights it and eventually gets back to her house in her home county.
In case anyone doesn’t know, Pinellas county has ‘Assisted Living Facilities’ which are in reality Kill Facilities. The children get POA, move the parent into the facility, the parent gets drugged up and starts to deteriorate. This allows to activate the POA, whereby the children typically put their property on the market while they’re still breathing!
In my woman’s case she went and visited her in the facility. The first time the woman was out of it. The next time the woman was clear headed and handed her a bunch of pills, asking her to dispose of them outside since “they check the trash”. She used my woman’s phone to contact her attorney and bank to take back POA and get back to her house.
Her family has tried this several times. There are laws on the books to protect seniors but there are also specific facilities which are very good at skirting those laws and assisting heirs to Cash Out the senior. I try not to even drive through Pinellas.
I was gonna say...at $20 million, the folks getting the money could really take care of this lady. Possibly even building her a house that exactly replicates the current home on a less expensive lot. It would be the right thing to do for her. Hired caregivers would be an added nice touch.
It’s sad to see that inheritance will show you how strong a family is, or how broken it is. That money can break those bonds.
Unless you have family land for decades. Minority ownership in land is a tax strategy because, at death, during estate settlement, how do you value a fractional share? Great for honest families.
And the beat goes on. Someone, a family group will be dividing the income among themselves.
Or what is even worse, they have an expensive one drawn up in a fit of pique -- like her's likely would have been with trust work -- but then won't sign it, and won't pay for it.
Karma takes care of that.
I saw this in the 1970s...one single member forced the sale of a farm. This gal (in her 70s) kept thinking she’d get around quarter of a million. Once the auction was done and lawyers paid...it was about $30k for her ‘share’. Created a disgruntled family situation...once she passed on, no one from the family attended her funeral.
Lol, not if you wanna get back at relatives from the grave lol
She might not own any of it but had been allowed to live there.
Agreed. As the media does with most legal matters, this story is simplified to the point of incoherence. It seems what’s going on here is what we call in CA “partition by sale.” I refuse to buy the narrative that this is some great tragedy. As others have stated, she should do just fine and live well in assisted living or perhaps her own new home, etc. I understand the impulse to “keep the property in the family” but that’s just not tenable over the long term, and doing it by devising fractional shares is about the worse way to do it. Granting a life estate, or a trust, though the latter can’t be perpetual.
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