You have worked hard over your entire lifetime and have accumulated a lot of stuff, including your home, stocks, bonds, mutual funds and other investments. You have been thinking about what will happen to it all when you are gone. You would like to be able to give what you have, to whom you want, when you want, the way you want.
However, your children or other loved ones may be thinking differently. They may be thinking that they are entitled to an equal share of your stuff when you are gone. Or they may believe that they are entitled to lifetime gifts from you.
Sometimes, your loved ones may even start thinking that your property is theirs, even before you are gone. Then they become upset because you are spending “their” inheritance.
Luckily, in this day and age, your assets are not your loved ones’ birthright. You may want to leave your estate in equal shares to your children after you are gone, but you don’t have to. In most states, including Michigan, only if you die without a will could your children or other loved ones be entitled to equal shares of your estate.
You can disinherit the child or other relative who has disowned you or is in prison. Do you really want to leave something to the druggy who will just shoot it up or smoke it? What about the lazy child who will use any inheritance to continue to be lazy? Or you can disinherit all of the kids and leave everything to charity. You can do whatever you want.
You have thought about leaving everything to your children in equal shares. But unless you have kept a ledger of every expenditure for every child beginning when he or she is born, it is virtually impossible for you to truly treat your children “equally”. You can not realistically keep track of all of the time and money you have spent over the years on each child. Every child is different and has different needs. However, you can be “fair”. But what is fair?
Have you made larger gifts to some of the children during your lifetime that you did not make to others? You may have kept track of these gifts, such as helping one child with the down payment on a house or bailing another out of a financial crisis. By keeping track of these lifetime gifts, you may want to take them into consideration when dividing up your estate after you are gone.
There are some situations in which you may not want to give a child any additional monetary gifts, during your lifetime or after you are gone – for their own good. Such situations include poor money management skills, addictions, marriage to a predator, poor life choices, etc. On the other hand, you may want to give or leave extra gifts to a child who goes above and beyond in service to your needs or other family members’ needs.
Often in families, especially larger families, there is a helpful child and a demanding child. The helpful child is always there for you and the rest of the family in time of need. This child is willing to put his or her life on hold, to be available to help out in a family crisis. Do you want to reward this child for devotion to the family? If so, the fair thing to do may be to leave the helpful child a larger share of your estate.
On the other hand, the demanding child seems to be regularly asking for his or her “fair” share of your estate, while you are still alive. These demands are oftentimes in the form of financial bailouts resulting from lack of proper planning or poor spending habits. Does one child always seem to end up with your car or appliances when you get new ones?
These continued demands can pressure you to give in because the you do not want to create a rift in the family. You value your relationships with all of your children, even the demanding one. In most of the cases of families with demanding children that I have seen, there is already a rift in the family, caused by the apparent favoritism towards the demanding child.
When you make additional gifts to demanding children, it will rarely changes anything. It may make matters even worse. Continued gifts to demanding children may increase the animosity between the demanding children receiving these gifts and the other children who have not. Or it may increase the demanding child’s feeling of entitlement to your funds now.
Demanding children often believe, even before there is a lifetime gift or an estate settlement, that they have been short changed during their entire lives. They can tell you what each of their siblings has received that they did not and when. They almost always forget what they have received that their siblings did not.
In most instances I have seen, the demanding child has actually been favored due to his or her continued requests and demands. Furthermore, the demanding children often have been less attentive to the parents because of a self-centered view of reality and the belief by such children that they have not received what is owed to them.
When the time comes to care for aging parents, demanding children usually are the first ones to tell their siblings what to do, but are also the last ones willing pitch in and help. Demanding children typically help out only when it is convenient or beneficial for them to do so.
Do you have a child who has moved in with you because of a divorce, lost job or some other life event, and now won’t leave. This type of demanding child often does not do his or her fair share of household chores or contribute a fair share toward household expenses. The child may even expect you to do your parental chores that you did when they were growing up, such as cooking, cleaning and laundry.
How do you get them out? You could evict them, but that can create loads of family friction. One option that I have seen work successfully in a number of cases is to just sell the big house. You can then either move into an apartment or a small one bedroom condominium where there is no room for the child and his or her family.
You can also level the playing field with your estate plan. You could leave these demanding children a smaller portion of your estate after you are gone if you believe that would be the fair thing to do.
Its your property. You are able to do what you want with your “stuff”, both during your lifetime and after you are gone. Don’t be swayed by demanding children. Your children are not entitled to anything of yours. Equal is not necessarily fair and fair is not always equal.
By: Matthew M. Wallace, CPA, JD
Published edited August 31, 2014 in The Times Herald newspaper, Port Huron, Michigan as: Equal treatment might not always be fair