Second Marriages Cause Court Battles Over Estates
An excerpt from the beginning of the article is below:
There once was a man who married a woman much younger than him. They were married just one year when he died. Within days of his funeral, his grieving widow had a dumpster parked outside their home and she threw into it all the china, silverware and mementos associated with the man’s first wife and children. The problem was, the children of that marriage were still very much alive and would have wanted some of it.
“There was nothing in the estate documents that said, ‘I leave all my heirlooms to my children.’ And there was a daughter who would have loved to have had the china,” says Carol O’Neill, vice president in the wealth management group at Mechanics Bank in Walnut Creek, Calif. “She got her piece. The children got their piece. But it was the personal property I remember so vividly.”
There’s nothing that brings contention to the execution of a will like a second marriage. Sometimes second spouses take money for themselves and their own kids at the expense of their spouse’s first children. Sometimes, it’s the first spouse’s children who go through all kinds of machinations to make sure their stepmother or stepfather, and their kids, get nothing from the estate.
Special thanks to Jim Hillhouse (Wealth Counsel) for bringing this to my attention.