Estate Stuff, 10/7/14

by Laura and Allegra

We keep wanting to call our father and talk about baseball.  :-/

We usually go over to pay our father's bills on Saturdays. Well, to help our father pay them.  If we can say one good thing about what we've done, it's that we helped improve his credit rating dramatically.  We've always been good with money.

On the other hand....there's the whole emotional aspect of all of this. We collectively are not a crier when it comes to grief.  Oh, we feel it.  We've just never been the type to turn on the water works.  Maybe because on some level we know how fleeting life is.  And how much it can be a struggle for some people, including us.

Brother #1 isn't a crier either.  As his wife told us, "he'll cry for 10 minutes and then he's done for 10 years."  Or something like that.

Brother #2 is a different story. He's the emotional one, and he lived with our father.  Brother #2 wears his feelings on his sleeve.  Some of us [Laura points to Allegra] think it's an astrological thing.  In any event, he's more emotionally expressive than us and brother #1 combined.

And he wants to keep living in the house indefinitely. We know that him staying there, at least for the time being, is an important part of his grieving process, and we want to respect that. Still, we and brother #1 are gently trying to explain to him why we'll need to eventually sell it.

There are financial considerations that affect all three of us. The house was deeded over to the three of us equally a couple of years ago, so that it wouldn't count as part of our father's assets should he have to go into a nursing home. Part of the legal arrangement stated that our father would be allowed to live in the house for as long as he wanted.

The house has a mortgage. Property taxes in the area are significant, as are utility costs. Brother #2 has no real awareness of the finances involved. He is an office clerk. There is no way that he could maintain the house even if he wanted to.

Our father had a life insurance policy, and a pension....but how much of a dent will it make? There are also estate taxes, inheritance taxes....it scares the living crap out of us.