Remember When You Named Your Girlfriend as a Beneficiary? He Didn't Either
williamhalaw.comIt is super difficult to ask deceased people what they actually wanted.
In respect for the dead person, we absolutely have to carry out their will.
It might be there there is a brother somewhere that feels hurt. But we really don't know if the deceased one really wished that his early crush should have the money.
What we can do, however, is to make sure we update our wills.
> In respect for the dead person, we absolutely have to carry out their will.
We trust judges when they decide to send people to prison for decades, so I don't see why we shouldn't trust them if they decide that this will is probably a mistake.
There wasn’t a will. The guy wrote his GFs name in some form in 1989 and probably never thought about it again.
We don't trust judges. We trust the process they follow. A judge is not a God, why we have a hierarchy to redo judgments (lift a decision to a higher court).
Also, IMHO judging a person for something they did not do is amongst the worst things that can happen in a society. This is also why there is a principle of rather letting 10 guilty people go free rather than convicting a single innocent person.
(i am speaking from a Scandinavian juris system)
Judges rely on evidence when making decisions. Is there Any evidence that it is a mistake?
I don't know. If the case is not discussed in court, we will never know. This is why we should not blindly follow a will out of respect of the dead person, because there may be evidence this is just a mistake.
Yes. The time and other circumstances as described by the article.
That signature is only one piece of evidence, and it doesn't exist in a vacuum, it has a context.
The article seems to imply we are sure this was all by mistake. I don't share this view.
If the deceased created an account for Murray (ex-girlfriend), and later removed Murray as the second beneficiary from another asset (but kept other ex-girlfriend Sjostedt on the same), then this may be what he intended.
As a single guy, providing part of your assets to two former partners (one might say common law wives, given they cohabited longer-term) that shared in your life or parts of it is reasonable, especially given that there are other assets that went to the brothers, so his funeral was covered and his next of kin can still enjoy the life insurance etc.
Maybe there is a case to be made for 1. not filling in beneficiary forms and 2. leaving behind a will (with a notary public) to remove ambiguity, especially when arrangements are unusual.
The difference is one required an annual update whereas the retirement fund didn’t require an update at all so easy to over look.
I don't understand the viewpoint many people have on these matters. I know someone who has been lying to her elderly mother (now deceased) for years stating she won't contest the will, which names her sister as the owner of the house which is now in a well-to-do area.
The funeral had only finished a day before when she started contesting it.
If I die from something with a few days warning, I'll transfer everything I can to a trust administered by someone I can trust whilst I'm still alive to remove this option. Although I'm sure that'll be contested too.
Just follow peoples wishes. You don't have to like them and you can speculate as much as you want, but what they put on paper is what goes. It's disrespectful and grubby to go chasing money that wasn't intended for you (or in theory may have been but you're not sure so you'd best grab it anyway, right?). Whoevers assets they were, they weren't yours.
TLDR: A person named a girlfriend as a retirement plan beneficiary. They later broke up, he had another girlfriend, they eventually also broke up, and 10 years after the second breakup he died single and childless.
His brothers want money to go to estate (brothers), but the beneficiary form trumped estate (as it should).
It is not clear from reading the post what the account owner wanted. It is possible he just didn't care who gets the money after he died.
The advice makes sense though -- if you want specific beneficiaries, name them on your accounts.
I think its important to mention that he broke up with the ex in question in 1989, and died in 2015.
There are, IMO, many things that would be important to mention if we wanted to try to glean the account holder's real intent on the disposition of his retirement account.
For example, how long he had relationship with each girlfriend (he had broken up with the second a while ago, too; for all we know there may be others). What were his relationships with each brother and so on.
But such moral judgements are, to me, not the right way to go. The person had money, if he cared where it should have gone after his death he should have made a will or changed the beneficiary. We should not reject his existing instructions just because they were too old and assume he wanted something different on the basis of some moral judgements. My 2c.
The article seems to suggest that this is a bad thing. But what's the alternative? That it just gets soaked up by the bank or the state or whatever happens when there's no will? Better it go to a person even semi by mistake like in this case in my opinion
People updating their wills is the good alternative they're advocating.
Maybe he did consider this before he died and was happy with it? Anything beyond the black and white is wild speculation.
That might not avoid the problem here. Wills can be overridden by documents such as the one in the article.
Life's too short.
Similar story: "AITA for not declining or signing over my portion of my ex bfs life insurance payout too his mom?"
https://www.reddit.com/r/AmItheAsshole/comments/1d8rfzr/aita...
This is the entire basis behind the movie "I Care A Lot;" apparently, becoming the LPoA for lonely/forgotten folks on the brink of death and collecting their insurance payouts/assets is big business.
If I was on the receiving end of something like this I’d just give the money back.
Easy to say when not only is it not happening to you but you haven't spent years engaging with the legal process and waiting for the estate to try and make sure you can't have it. The possibility of winning a jackpot would grow on you, you'd start to imagine what it would be like to keep it and the brothers, being your adversaries, would look less deserving than they do to an outsider.
I suppose it depends.
If this person had intentionally done this to my benefit over their children and it was current then sure I'd take the money.
But if it's a 50 years old out of date commitment to a life long gone and there are other genuinely more deserving in terms of being actually children then yeah I'd give it to them.
I'd just see it as a kind of a bank error. If the bank drops 1 million bucks into your account what would you do? I'd give it back. There have been cases reported of this in Australia where people do spend the money that the bank inadvertently puts in their account - I find that hard to understand. Actually I find it easy to understand but disappointing that people are so willing to do the crime just because its offered to them easy. Not suggested that in the case of this will it would be a crime, just suggesting that there's a right thing to do.
And I have done stuff like that. About 30 years ago I got paid about $7,000 for a software job by a client then got paid a second time. I just called em up and gave it back.
> There have been cases reported of this in Australia where people do spend the money that the bank inadvertently puts in their account - I find that hard to understand.
It happened to me once and it never occurred to me I could spend the money just because someone made a mistake. If I was stupid enough to spend it, I would have to give it back anyway, so what's the point?
> but you haven't spent years engaging with the legal process and waiting for the estate to try and make sure you can't have it
I mean in the proposed alternative that wouldn't happen because you would tell them "hey I think this is a mistake, i think he just forgot to update the beneficiary". You only have the years of legal process where you decide that you should keep the money.
I think I'd give some back. No way you'd really give $1m back though unless you really didn't need it (possible here). I would say morally nobody is really entitled to inheritance and they clearly don't need the money, so you're doing them a favour by giving it back.
Many wouldnt though.
An statement by rich software developer does not extend to a significant part of a population.
Wealth doesn't breed morality. Morality is something that cuts across all wealth lines. Poor people aren't all criminals and rich people aren't all saints.
"Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral." -Brecht
(First food, then moral)
If only I was rich. I'm not. As the other commenter says, doing the right thing isn't about money. Integrity is doing the right thing even when no-one is looking.
It also depends on your political beliefs about inheritance and merit.
I don’t think anyone "deserve" to inherit. It’s just money you never worked to get and that you get because your parents had extra money.
So, morally, why would the brothers deserve more the money than the ex girlfriend ? Maybe they were still in good terms. Maybe she brought more joy in his life than his brothers. Maybe not but enough for her to get her share. Or just maybe he didn’t care enough about this and should be considered ok with the outcome.
You don’t deserve 1 more million on your bank account because you happened the brother of someone. Yes it may happen eventually but that’s just luck.
And I’m not taking side for anyone here. I can totally understand why the brothers would be upset and I would probably be if I were in their shoes. But at the same time, as someone who doesn’t count on his brother’s death to become rich, I’ll have a hard time being empathetic.
They should at least be upset about the carelessness of your brother rather than the ex girlfriend.
tl:dr; You are allowed to think that doing the right thing is not to give the money back because it was never meant to be theirs.
You don't deserve to get money, but you do deserve to have the money you did deserve go somewhere of your choosing.
In this case, as you say, the guy didn't put much care into the issue, so we don't have to worry too much about if our decisions are what he would have chosen. What he chose was to barely consider the matter and mostly leave it up to others to figure out.
The fact he did remove the 2nd gf is interesting but probably has 2 arguments that cancel out. A, he removed the 2nd ex from insurance as soon as she was an ex, so in general he doesn't intent for exes to still be beneficiaries. B, he removed the 2nd and only didn't remove the 1st, so keeping the 1st on was intentional.
I do not think the 1st was intentional, but not taking care of this stuff in general was intentional, so he gets what he gets.
The brothers, well it's unfortunate that unfortunately they had a careless brother. If the court gives it to the ex, no great travesty has happened. The state is only deciding because the guy largely didn't bother deciding for himself.
Certainly.
But the lower the stakes, the easier it is to show integrity. Doing the right thing at no cost is easy.
Integrity isn’t just about doing the right thing when no-one is looking.
It’s doing right thing, even when no-one is looking, no matter what it costs you.
May not be that easy.
Sounds like “disclaiming” must take place within 9 months of death.
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/06/refuseinheritance.a...
Don't know if I'd give away 1 million.
> back
To whom? The deceased person?
To whoever legitimately won the inheritance lottery, I guess.
Well, then ex girlfriend would be the one who legitimately won the lottery.
That is literally debatable. The definition of legitimately in this case is literally not clear and quite arguable. You have merely picked a side, not pointed out some obvious definitive truth.
The ex legitimately has a claim. The strength of the claim is still to be decided.
Some one challenged the ex getting the money. Until there is a decision, she is the legitimate beneficiary.
I can not just challenge something with you to make it not legitimate.
This is like not guilty until proven different.
If the process by which one becomes a beneficiary is swiss cheese, that does matter.
That changes the strength of the very word beneficiary in the statement "beneficiary until proven otherwise". It's now only "maybe beneficiary until proven otherwise."
In other words, arguable, requiring to be determined.
You're not the thing until proven otherwise, the thing has to be proven in the first place now.
Beneficiary until proven otherwise. That sounds precise. If you are in poor belief that you really are not the beneficiary, I would take care spending the money!
That is how it always has been.
The tax agency can come back 5 years later and ammend You tax filling.
The same here. You announce who the beneficiary is (the ex girlfriend), someone challenges that, but that does not change the beneficiary until the decision has been made.
I don't really see other ways it could work?
> You're not the thing until proven otherwise, the thing has to be proven in the first place now.
You misunderstand. You are the thing until proven otherwise.
"You misunderstand. You are the thing until proven otherwise."
Not if the process by which you become the the thing is swiss cheese.
In that case you are nothing but a potential. A potential thing is not a thing.
I should declare my taxes Swiss cheese.
To the estate, in which case the next beneficiary gets the ducats. After the ones that are named in the testament, the law specifies beneficiaries.
The deceased person's estate, yeah. Often it's possible to simply disclaim an inheritance and you would therefore never receive the money; but sometimes that means it would go to your heirs.
With a $1M account, it's a lot easier to say you would return it than to actually do it though. That's life changing money and it's hard to say no to life changing money.
Yeah. To their "estate". It's mentioned that some of his assets that didn't have a beneficiary named landed there and I think they were to be split according to the will of the deceased.
There was no will, no spouse, no children.
"He died at 59, single and childless, with no will and no guidance on who should inherit his assets."
Ok, in case when there's no will there's path of inheritance defined by law. It's still the best way to go forward.
Parents, siblings, siblings children.
My understanding is that beneficiary trumps a will, and definitely trumps the default when there is no will.
What would be the point of a beneficiary if it gets ignored even without a will?
I think beneficiary trumps everything. But we are talking about what you could do with the money if you were (undeserving) beneficiary. Giving it back to the dead person (precisely donating it to their estate) is the right thing to do although probably imperfect because donations are often taxed.
Really? I wouldn't. I'd consider it a generous gift from beyond the grave, and use it to help my own family.