FROM K IPL INGER R E PO R T
make a will BUT.. . MAKE IT RIGHT! Y o u n g or old . . . rich or poor . . . read this revealing article, then take necessary steps. T h e r e is o n l y one thing worse, from the point of view of both you and your heirs, than leaving no will. That is leaving a bad one.
according to his will, by selling a piece of land. The rest of his property was to go to his wife. But he sold the land before his death and failed to change his will. Following a trial, the entire estate went to his widow, and the Court of Appeals refused to heed the daughters’ protests. Even more serious is the failure to change a will after a change in do mestic status. Just before he went over seas, an air force officer from Texas made a will leaving his possessions to his mother. Later he married and had two children; in 1949 he died, leaving his will unchanged. After lengthy proceedings, a Texas court recently held that the wife will get her full legal share of his estate, but the children’s share will be for their use only until they are 21. You can’t ever assume that a change in your status will revoke a will valid ly made, especially when it involves disinheriting a husband or wife, a hard thing to do under the law. A Tennessee testator, who had left his estate to his wife, later separated from her and made a property settle ment. They were never divorced, but she formally relinquished any claim to the property coming to her in the will. Nevertheless, the Court of Ap peals held that the will was not re voked. The case is due for a second round to determine how much the widow will get. You must think, too, about whether your estate will shrink by the time it is divided. One man left a great many specific money bequests to dis tant relatives and the residue of what he thought would be a large estate to his son. Unfortunately, by the time the executor had dug up enough mon ey to pay off the gifts, there was nothing left for the unhappy son. THE KING'S BUSINESS
After the brother’s death a holographic will (one handwritten by the testator himself and not witnessed) was found. It merely said, “ I give and bequeath to my sister, Elsie Greer, as long as she may live, and then to Fred Anderson and Mary Alma Greer.” Nowhere was there a mention of what the brother was leaving. The courts finally inserted the" words “ all my property” where they should have been right along, and Mrs. Greer got the farm for her lifetime — after a struggle. Another recent case involved a bitter fight among three cousins named Jos eph because a will failed to specify the intended heir. Will time change it? N o o n e c a n predict with complete accuracy, of course, what the pas sage of time will do, and it is neces sary to review a will every now and then to determine whether its pro visions still reflect your wishes. One obvious mistake is to leave spe cific property in a will and then dis pose of the property before death. The Appellate Court of Illinois had to solve that problem recently. A mother wrote a will in 1942, giving her cash to three daughters and her farm to all eight of her children. Later she sold the farm, distributed some of the proceeds among the children and kept the rest. She died in 1951 without having changed the will. Should the cash from the sale go to the three daughters or should all the children share? The court decided that the woman died intestate (without w ill), and the the three daughters were to share a costly battle. A California man made a similar error. He wanted his two daughters to get $2,000 each—a sum to be raised,
If your testament is fuzzily written, open to misinterpretation, badly thought out or improperly drawn, the very people you hope will bless you as wise and generous may curse you as they watch their inheritances slip away in court and lawyer’s fees. And don’t think that family squab bles and legal wrangles happen only after a rich man’s death. They can be just as bitter and just as wasteful over a few hundred dollars’ worth of gov ernment bonds and a gold watch as over half a million in oil wells. If you have a will, take it out and look at it. If you haven’t one, start planning. As you study your present will or the draft of a new one, ask yourself the questions posed in this article. But remember that they repre sent only the most common mistakes. There are plenty of other pitfalls in the highly technical business of draw ing a will. Watch for them. Is it clear to who gets what? A l t h o u g h t h e r e are no figures to prove it, the chances are excellent that if your will does land in court some day, it will be because you wrote it so carelessly that it leaves room for argument. The most frequent mistake along this line is failure to describe property well enough for it to be identified and failure to pin down which Joe Doakes you want to get that watch. Take the recent case of Elsie Greer, who had to fight all the way through Tennessee’s Court of Appeals before she could claim property she had help ed pay for in the first place. Mrs. Greer and her brother owned a farm jointly and lived there together.
34
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online