Elder relative unwilling to change will to reflect current wishes An elder relative, over 100 years old but with their mental faculties remarkably intact, has informed me after the death of their eldest child that I will be the executor of their estate. Let's say the estate's total value is more than $1 million and less than $6 million. It will be divided among ten beneficiaries, each receiving a percentage. One heir currently lives in a house that would be part of the estate. The elder relative has stated that they must keep the house, anything inside it, and perhaps some additional funds for property taxes and such &quot;off the top&quot; (meaning, they receive this in addition to their percentage of the remainder). For reasons that stretch over decades of family history, I believe strongly in the justice of this arrangement (which I do not benefit from). The beneficiary in the house devoted considerable time and energy to caring for the testator. Other beneficiaries have their own opinions, but most at least accept it as their relative's wishes. Unfortunately, this arrangement is not reflected in the will. While I have expressed that I think this plan needs to be specified in the will, I doubt that will happen. In our culture, it is not well received to tell an older family member they must do something. The testator is the unquestioned benevolent head of the family. What can I do, now and/or after the testator is deceased, to make their wishes occur? I'm guessing that if beneficiaries decide they want to fight about this, then there isn't much that can be done, but are there elegant solutions available if the other beneficiaries are cooperative?
The executor must follow the will The executors legal duty is to execute the testator’s intent as detailed in their will. While I have no doubt that you understand the testators verbal wishes as expressed to you on a particular day - how do you know they didn’t change their mind some time after that? As others have said, with the beneficiaries’ agreement you can override the express written wishes but if one or more don’t agree, you will have to follow the will. To do otherwise exposes you to personal liability if a disgruntled beneficiary sues. The will is your shield, you step out from behind it at your peril. Now, the beneficiaries may be perfectly happy with the verbal intent now but … when there is money on the table, they may see it differently. Do yourself a favour, have the difficult conversation and get the will changed or refuse to be the executor.
Yes, subject to the deadline for presenting claims to the estate of the decedent (within sixty days of publication of public notice). If a timely claim is filed against the estate, Article 9 of the Uniform Commercial Code allows a defense in to deficiency claim debt such as this one that the method of the sale of the collateral was unreasonable, but this is rarely a complete defense and is rarely successful in practice. Lack of notice would not automatically invalidate the debt (and the instrument creating the debt probably waives the co-signers right to notice of a sale contractually).
Yes; While contracts can be made in written and oral form bigger acquisitions normally are in written form. Also consider this: They can't prove that they told you that the balcony is not usable. Thats a big negative in buying a property and they would need to have it documented. If they still refuse consider seeking professional help. In my country lawyers offer "fast help" that isn't legally binding but costs you only 10$ and helps you finding out if your case has any possibility to get accepted/if you're right. EDIT: Regarding the reservation fee: You can dismiss that. You didn't reserved that object, you reserved a house with balcony.
Your father's probate estate is responsible for the repairs (assuming that your father owned the property outright and not through an entity, in which case the entity would be responsible). To the extent you accept rent, you are effectively acting as an agent of your father's estate in anticipation of being appointed to administer his estate. As his likely successor in the intestate estate, you have an interest in making the repairs, if urgent and if this mitigates the long term cost of the repairs and of the liability to the tenant for not making repairs promptly, that you would ultimately end up bearing. Often, it is possible to get appointed fairly quickly, at least on an emergency or temporary basis pending a formal permanent appointment to administer his estate. Doing so, if you could, would take you out of the shadows of acting in reliance on your future authority to act on behalf of your father's estate that you have not yet been granted. If you accept rents and make repairs and then someone else ends up being appointed to administer your father's estate (e.g. because a will you didn't know about is discovered and appoints someone else) and if the person ultimately appointed is displeased with the actions you took without formal authority to do so, rather than ratifying those actions, you are in a bit of a pickle and could incur some legal liability to your father's estate that could reduce your inheritance if there are also other heirs. You also have the option of simply walking away from his estate, not trying to be appointed to administer it, and not trying to claim an inheritance. If you do that, you have no personal liability to your father's tenants at all. If the situation that your father left behind is a truly troublesome mess and his estate is probably insolvent, it may even make rational sense for you to do that. You can't be held responsible for inaction in any way other than the depletion of your inheritance that arises naturally from your inaction. If this is the case, however, you should not accept rents from the tenants or have any other involvement in the management of your father's assets.
Does B have a legal obligation to inform A that changes were made to the document? This is definitely not a simple yes-no question. One ought to consider not only the tenets of contract law, but also notions of equity and of public policy. On the one hand, courts acknowledge modified contracts that result from a battle of the forms. On the other hand, sliding changes in the contract without adequately directing the counterparty's attention to them tends to contravene the contract law covenant of good faith and fair dealing. In the scenario you outline, imagine the inefficiency and risk of mistake if the parties engage in several rounds of offers and counter-offers by sliding changes scattered all over the latest draft of a contract (this is totally feasible, especially as laws nowhere limit the number of times a party can make a counter-offer). Unless each party is conspicuous about his latest changes to the contract, the dynamics can easily become a matter of which party inadvertently binds himself to unacceptably detrimental clauses (some of which might re-occur after being stricken in a previous draft). This hinders the contract law prerequisite that a contract be entered knowingly and willfully. Although the parties are responsible for reading the contract, subjecting the offeror/offeree to devote valuable resources each time a newly altered contract goes from one direction to the other seems contrary to public policy. Furthermore, that defeats the purpose of negotiations and of the prior efforts each party spent toward the contract (such as valuations and risk analysis). I'm just curious to understand what legally prevents this type of things from happening in general. An offer may include language to the effect of accepting the contract 'as is'. See the provision in the Uniform Commercial Code (for instance, see MCL 440.2207(2)(a)) whereby alterations are precluded "[if] the offer expressly limits acceptance to the terms of the offer". The aforementioned statute also precludes terms which significantly alter the contract. See MCL 440.2207(2)(b). In a context of loan contracts --apropos of your example--, a borrower's unilateral alteration of the interest rate, of payment schedules, etc. constitute material alterations. Indeed, financial institutions are utmost sensitive to changes in interest rates and the timing of cash flows. Even in the case of an offeree's immaterial alterations of a contract, an offeror might prevail under principles of equity. This is more evident in the case of entities which enter and manage a multitude of contracts simultaneously, be it via contracts of adhesion or upon negotiations with each counterparty. In line with my point on public policy, the additional cost of filtering a counterparty's last minute occurrences would make it impossible for economies of scale to develop.
Unfortunately, it looks like the answer is yes. There was a bill passed around 2007 called the &quot;Maintenance and Welfare of Parents and Senior Citizens Act, 2007&quot;. You should track down official information as I am going by newspaper articles. If an employed, adult child isn't supporting their parents or step-parents, 60 or older, their parents or step-parents can go to a tribunal and ask for an enforcement order. The upper limit was 10000 rupees per month or a possible jail term. The Times of India has an article from December 2019 that the government plans to expand the law to include son- and daughter-in-laws as responsible besides children, step-children, and adoptive children. The new bill also includes grandparents and they do not have to be over 60. The plan is also to remove the 10000 cap.
No Pennsylvania law § 2104 requires: (10) Requirement that heir survive decedent for five days.--Any person who fails to survive the decedent by five days shall be deemed to have predeceased the decedent for purposes of intestate succession and the decedent's heirs shall be determined accordingly. Now, a will can provide contingencies for if an heir predeceases the testator such as flowing to the heir's spouse or children but if it doesn't then the heir is treated as non-existent and what would have been their bequest is dealt with by the other provisions of the will. The life annuity is not a part of the grandfather's estate and the funds will be distributed in accordance with the terms of its own contract, not the will. Usually, this means at the discretion of the trustee and nominations of beneficiaries are usually non-binding on the trustee; that is, they can distribute the funds as they believe the decedent would want. Your aunt should seek proper legal advice quickly.
Short Answer Inheritance usually refers only to a post-humous transfer, but that usage isn't absolute. There are circumstances when people will use the word in an extremely broad sense that also includes large transfers received during the donor's life in lieu of a true inheritance received at death, and it isn't completely incorrect to do so. For example, if the stock made up 90% or 100% ownership in a family business, often this might be called an inheritance even if it was received while the donors were alive. Still, if you received the stock while the donors were alive, the preferred term would be to call it a gift (even though a gift can include gifts made during life and gifts made upon death). Long Answer If you receive something because someone died and their will says that you should receive it, the proper legal term for this is a devise. You are a devisee. A devise and bequest and legacy are close synonyms. Historically, a gift by will of personal property at death was called a bequest or a legacy, and a gift by will of real property at death was called a devise, but the terms are now often used more or less interchangably. The original primary meaning of the word legacy has become a secondary and technical one in contemporary usage. Now, the term legacy is primarily used to refer to the reputation that someone (usually, but not always, someone who has died or at least ceased to participate in a particular field in which they are distinguished) has left behind and is associate with. If you receive something because someone died and they didn't have a will, the proper legal term for this is an inheritance and you are an heir. (In civil law jurisdictions not derived from the laws of England where English is spoken, such as Louisiana, there is also the term a testamentary inheritance which means a devise or bequest in the narrow technical senses of those words.) However, many people (even in legal circumstances) use the term inheritance to refer to anything received as a consequence of someone's death even if it was pursuant to something other than intestate succession (which is the passing of property at death other than pursuant to a will or a beneficiary designation or joint ownership). And, the term heir is likewise sometimes used more generally to refer to anyone receiving an inheritance in the broader sense of the word. The term heir also refers to someone who would be entitled to receive an intestate succession at the time if someone died, even in the absence of any actual inheritance or death. This narrow sense of the word is also called an heir at law. And the term heir is also used in a slightly different sense to refer to someone who would receive the property or feudal title of someone if they died, even if this is not pursuant to intestate succession. If one wants to distinguish this sense of this paragraph from other senses of the word heir, one can say heir apparent. (There are also non-literal senses of the words inheritance and heir that refer to people who are recipients of intellectual contributions made by someone or some movement. Similarly, there is a technical sense of the word in genetics which means to receive a trait genetically from a parent. More generally, sometimes the semantic focus when one uses the word inheritance is on the fact that something is received by someone in a younger generation from an older generation, rather than on the timing of the transfer.) If you receive property from a trust or a beneficiary designation you are a transferee also called a beneficiary and the technical terms for this are non-probate transfer or distribution. The term gift usually refers to a transfer of property during life, but the strict technical meaning of the word gift includes both gifts made during life and gifts given as a consequence of a death. The strict technical term for a gift given during life when the context doesn't make the fact that the donor is alive at the time of the gift is a lifetime gift or an inter vivos gift. While it is contrary to the technical meaning of the term inheritance and also to the broader literal meaning of the term inheritance, people sometimes the term inheritance very loosely to refer to a large lifetime gift made in lieu of an inheritance or devise or bequest at death. But, this usage is not appropriate in technical discussions. If you received the stock during the life of the donor, it would be more clear and a better usage to say that it was a gift, rather than an inheritance, even though it would not be unheard of (and not absolutely incorrect) to call a large gift made during life in lieu of a transfer at death an inheritance and even though a gift, in theory, could be made after death. In this extremely broad, but literal, sense, inheritance refers to a substantial, usually one time, intergenerational transfer of wealth. Also, when one talks about inherited wealth one is usually talking about all wealth received from lifetime gifts and gifts made upon death by any means, combined, rather than in the narrow sense of wealth received upon someone's death. Similarly, the word inheritance can be used in the sense of all of a person's inherited wealth rather than with respect to a particular transfer of property, and in this sense inheritance refers to all wealth received from lifetime gifts and gifts made upon death by any means, combined, rather than in the narrow sense of wealth received upon someone's death. Indeed, sometimes inheritance is used even more broadly still to refer to everything a person owns (i.e. all of their wealth) without regard to its source, although this usage is usually limited to poetic or religious uses of the word. (While I don't cite to sources here, I have been an estate planning attorney for twenty years and just yesterday taught a course to attorneys and accountants that spent the first 40 minutes or so defining these terms.) The origin of the word inherit is as follows: Middle English enherite ‘receive as a right’, from Old French enheriter, from late Latin inhereditare ‘appoint as heir’, from Latin in- ‘in’ + heres, hered- ‘heir’.