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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This situation is not uncommon in the South. Usually they all have to sign in order to sell. It can create title nightmares if a signature gets missed.
It’s best to have real estate passed to a sole owner. Divvy up cash equally if you want, but keep land in sole-owned parcels.
Interesting responses. My mother in law is getting up in age and my wife and I have discussed this as I assume her home on a river will be divided between her three kids.
We assume that we’ll ask her brother to buy out the shares of the other two. He doesn’t live nearby but stores a lot of stuff there including a couple collector cars We assume he’ll want to buy it so he doesn’t need to ever make any decisions about the stuff. (Yea, he takes advantage of his mom and she refuses to put her foot down. If it was me, I’d buy him a calendar for Christmas with a big red X on July 1. When he asks I’d say “that’s the date you have to get all your stuff moved out of my house, otherwise it becomes mine to sell or throw out.). He’s a nice guy and we like each other but it’s gotten ridiculous.
The two conditions can be confusing when presented in legal terms by a lawyer as they have been taught and usually do not vary from.
The thing to remember is that Joint Tenancy (with rights of survivorship) is a "last man standing" proposition who is often called the "remainderman". So long as more than one person who is named on the deed is living nothing can be done to the property without full concurrence by all other living parties. No party the agreement can do anything without full agreement by all other parties or some legal action resulting in "partition by sale".
In Tenants in Common transfer of the property upon death of co-owners must be conveyed by probate and does not happen automatically as in Joint Tenancy. The other problem is that each living party in the arrangement can sell their interest but can't convey title without agreement by all other parties to the deed, some of them may be complete strangers. The property is owned by the holders of the TIC deed as an "undivided interest" meaning you own a part of the whole that can't be parceled out but your part may be conveyed by sale or inheritance. IF it were divided who is to say what part any individual owns? They can't. No "partition by sale" is mentioned for TIC but based on this article it appears it can happen when a party such as a developer gathers up shares and eventually controls the property. Sort of like a hostile takeover.
There are cases for both types of ownership but in general Joint Tenancy is the vehicle of choice for ownership.
Something that seems so simple can become so complicated by the time the legal eagles get through with it.
We just bought a property with a cloud on the title owing to TIC being misconstrued as JT upon the death of the wife and no probate was done. The property was in limbo and not dealt with until the death of the surviving husband. Not sure how they got by with that but they did. Upon the father's death the son conveyed the property to the surviving siblings as TIC as if the father had held the property with his wife as if they were JT, they were not. The son later got the siblings to do a quit claim and put the property ownership in a JT condition between he and his siblings. He ended up being the last man standing and thus carving out any of his nieces and nephews from their inheritance. In the title opinion my attorney caught the invalid transfer of the property on the death of the wife/mother of the fellow, the last man standing, I bought the property from. He did not have a valid title to the property he had agreed to sell. Going back to the death of the wife/mother her estate had to be probated to clear the title. It was. However, in that time someone could have made claims on the property further making a mess of the whole transaction.
Always buy title insurance. It may not cover everything but at least you have an interested and experienced party involved in seeing that the title is clear. Nothing is iron clad though.
It’s unbelievable how ugly things can get with a “family” when money is involved. I know.