I like where this is going. No doubt this will not be the end of the matter. I look forward to future discourse.

A+ thread

If nothing else, this year's Thanksgiving dinner with the family should be a lively affair. Unless it's already gotten to the point where certain people on not on certain other people's guest list anymore.

If you would have replaced "Good day sir" with "Checkmate" it probably would have been the most epic email in the history of emails..

Lunch-time drama from Betty and Richard...

Have to quote the following from Page 1 since it's relevant to Betty's latest rant, er email.

This is the email I got from Betty today.

Hi Amid,

I re-read the trust last night.

It said that we were supposed to have mom and uncle draw lots for all of the belongings and if there were any other supporting memorandums we were to uphold them , too and all documents that give specific items to specific people need to be upheld. It says that the last memorandum must be upheld first but if earlier memorandums exist, and they do not contradict the other, later memorandums, they are upheld as well.

You and I did not do things properly. We followed the spirit of the law but we did not follow the letter of the law. We did it because we knew it was her wishes and her will. But legally we did not act properly.

According to Grandparents' trust, all of those items that people received (the wedding ring, the diamond ring, the silver necklace, the candles and kiddish cup, the silver necklace, the gold watch, the diamond broach, the shirt clips, the fancy plates... etc) were all given improperly and should not have been.

So to do things by the letter of the law, we need to ask all people give all of these things back. Then we will have mom and uncle flip a coin again and they can pick all of the items again. We need to have uncle and mom return all of their items and re-flip for all items because to be fair now there are new items that maybe they would choose differently.

I know this is not a fun thing to do, but it is the right and legal thing to do.

This is what I want to do.

OR we can uphold all documents, including the one that states that Richard gets the chess set and we can let everyone keep what they have.

This would be the spirit of the law thing to do because we all know Grandma and Grandpa want Richard to have it.

There is no time line in the trust. It does not say its a one time distribution or that there is a time limit on this. So the fact that I found this 2 years later doesn't matter at all according to the trust. And the fact that mom and uncle agreed doesn't matter either. Either they didn't know the document had to be signed or didn't care. But its not our problem. Now we know and we are the trustees and WE NEED TO DO THE RIGHT THING.

Uncle really should not have taken the chess set in the first place. And now that he knows that Grandparents wanted Richard to have it, he should just give it to him.

Uncle has already stated he does not want to give the chess set to Richard (verbally to you, at least as far as I know. you told me that he knows what's going on here and he wants to keep it)

We are not without recourse. We can use the remainding 8K in the trust to make this thing right.

What do you want to do?


It took me a while to digest that perfectly logical and grammatically correct email. But once I did, I replied with the following...

Quote:

What do you want to do?

Nothing.

I have made my position very clear. This is the third (and hopefully last) time I am saying this. I have no intentions on taking any other action at this time.

My only responsibility is to the assets still in the Trust. From now on, I am only am responding to inquiries about those assets and nothing more.

"richard gets dick" was so good. Awesome work LFS.

This surprises me. Despite the often-correct stereotypes about our people, I thought that long-simmering hatred and family schisms were primarily the domain of the goyim.

The items that weren't distributed correctly have no effect, I don't think, on the items that were. Were you or any other family members on "your side" awarded things outside of the way they were to be distributed through the trust? If so I suppose they could try to get them back through legal means (which again they won't do), but the chess set was dealt with correctly and is totally out of the picture.

Lolz at bringing everything back and doing a redraft simply because she doesn't like the outcome of the original.

Does the trust say this? What is the lawyer's opinion on this part? I can see an argument that said document is not a legal memorandum. I also could see an argument that ANYTHING would contradict the memorandum saying, essentially, "split everything."

But, it sounds like things just got a lot murkier legal wise.

I love this thread.

I really do hope there does get to be at least one more email though addressed to Dick and signed Checkmate though.

God this lady is enfuriating.

Tell her that the amount and extent of your recent correspondence regarding the settled estate is exorbitant and unjustified.

niss, I like what you've had to say in this thread.
I seem to remember hearing something about the concept.
What we've got here is two heirs, both being unreasonable, arguing over an asset worth about 1% of a roughly $0.5M inheritance. Did you notice the bit about where I suggested the legal fees would likely have to be charged back to the beneficiaries of the trust? It's not going to be cost efficient to be unreasonable. My hope would be that once "Betty" is faced with having to tell her Mom it's going to cost her 50% of the price of an expensive legal opinion to have any hope of recovering the chess set, and that the opinion is likely not to go her way, that Auntie and Rick will back down. Ofc., I could be wrong and they may decide to proceed just to stick Dad with his half of the cost of the opinion.

Is it fair that Dad would have to bear half the cost of the opinion? After all, it seems likely that he has every legal right to the chess set, and he did give Auntie two chances to choose it before he did. OTOH, it seems like he knew pretty well that it was expected by everybody (probably including his parents) that Richard would get the set but Dad took it anyway. I guess I see Dad as part of the problem here, though definitely less than 50% of it.

I think that once one trustee forgets that her duty is to the trust and not to her mother and brother, and starts threatening legal action, we've already got "extraordinary circumstances". Getting an opinion and being bound by it is likely to be more cost effective than having one side initiate an action and the other side defend against it. This approach also reduces Amid Cent's own exposure to personal costs for legal advice on how to act as trustee, and to liability wrt his actions as trustee.

Finally, note that I suggest the bit about paying for an opinion only after first laying out the legal groundwork for Betty and trying to get her to agree to the (what should be) obvious.

In his two most recent posts, Amid Cent provides us with two new relevant pieces of information: He has a buddy who is an estate attorney, and he thinks it unlikely that Betty would agree to getting a third party opinion. If I had known that before, my advice would have been a bit different. As it is, I think Amid Cent has handled things quite well (except perhaps for bringing this to OOT - but at least it has been entertaining for us).

One other point: it could be argued that Auntie is at least as guilty as Dad in not following the Grandparents' wishes, by her failure to use one of her choices to secure the chess set for Richard.

Cousin Betty at the supermarket

Honestly, I haven't reread the Trust since this nonsense started. I agree, this could add a level or murkiness to the situation, however it doesn't change my stance or my current intentions one bit.