Inheritance

[Werne]

When I die, I want to give everything I own to the charity, unless I die after I get married and/or I get kids, in that case they will inherit everything, but that's less likely to happen.

[Jopo1980]

The question is Werne, CAN you give everything to charity? It depends on what kind of inheritance laws your country has. If your laws are like those in Finland you cannot give everything to charity if you have legal heirs, such as parents, siblings, uncles or aunts etc.

[uihera]

I can see how the whole pet inheritance thing makes a good plot.

 

Rich guy dies. Leaves all money to Dog. Big family angry. They figure lets Kill The Dog and be done with it. lawyer shows up and tells them, there's a will for the dog. If dog is murdered all money goes to charity. Family angrier. They decide to kill him and make it look like an accident. They try a lot but dog (secretly an airbud) gets lucky everytime and family members drop in poop comically everytime. In the end the realize they love the dog very much. They live Happily Ever after.

 

Next Day: Dog goes outside to sh*t and gets run over by a car. Its called Murder and family looses everything.

Family: FFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUU!!!!!!!

 

So is it good?

[Nintii]

I like what Aurelius said concerning the "Trust Fund" ... I don't know if things are the same here as in the States but if you open a Trust here you can put all your possessions into the Trust and so you don't own anything ... the Trust does.

 

And should you pass away then there is really nothing that your offspring, relatives, including your spouse can fight over.

This even works if you get divorced, your husband can't touch a thing that belongs to you and vice versa because "you don't own anything", the Trust does.

I've actually seen this happen ... the wife in question (one of my friends), took her husband (also one of my friends) to court but because the husband had created this Trust before their marriage the court ruled in his favor and she got nothing.

 

If however, you are already married and you want to set up this Trust to "keep your stuff" then you MUST create this Trust "while everything between you and your spouse is still good" and not six months before you plan to run off with someone else.

In that scenario the judge will rule that you only created the Trust to hide your stuff from your partner and the court will order you to hand over all documentation and declare the Trust to be null and void.

Also, don't own 90% of the shares in the Trust, the court will rule against you saying that you just created it to keep your stuff ... rather spread the shares around but retain at least 49%.

The Trust is run by a board of Trustees who could be anyone ...

 

But getting back to the inheritance thing ... this Trust thing will work perfectly.

[TheBaer]

Where I live you can totally disinherit blood relatives, unless doing so would somehow go against the country's constitution. (It's a long document and has a lot of stipulations about dignity, human rights, children's rights, etc.) It would be too convoluted to explain all of the possible exceptions to disinheriting someone, so I'll just say that common sense usually applies to will disputes.

Similarly to nintii's country, in mine you can place everything you own in a trust fund, and then nobody will be able to touch it. Courts are much more formal, literal and strict about company/business/commercial law than they are about personal/private/constitutional law, so if I were to place my belongings in a trust fund and I then died, I doubt family members could do a thing about being disinherited.