Complicated intestacy.

Silvertabby

Marcon said:

Silvertabby said:

Possibly crystal ball time, but any ideas how long the solicitors will wait before giving up on finding the wife - or is it possible that they will refuse to disburse the funds without proof of her death?  And, if she has died, would the granddaughter still automatically inherit, given that there may not be any documentary proof of her relationship to my friend's brother (ie, father's names on her and her father's birth certificates)?

You say 'may not' - has anyone checked, always assuming the names of the relevant parties are known?

Silvertabby said:

3 am and my phone rang.  I thought I was going to get bad news (who else rings at 3 in the morning!) but it was my friend with her letter, hysterically claiming that the RAF hadn't said that they would pay her a pension, and what would she do without this money if they decided not to....

Time to invest in an answering machine and screen your calls!!

1.  The solicitor knows about the granddaughter.

Correction:  My friend says that she told the solicitors about the granddaughter.  They knew about the wife because they found a box of documents (marriage cert but no death/divorce certs) when they arranged for the flat to be cleared.

2. Not worth the aggro.  To be fair, she's only rung once at that time!

Spendless

To me if your friend informed solicitor herself about a potential Granddaughter then she knows full well there's another potential benefactor in addition to the wife, who might be alive! 


Though I accept people can be incredibly naïve/stupid  about intestacy rules. When sis-in law separated but didn't divorce her 2nd husband who was in a lot of debt, but also had a daughter (who was still a child) from her first marriage. We told her to get a will in place. She resisted  said that her ex wouldn't take from her daughter anyway - we pointed out his creditors would and then tried a different angle  to get us to believe us, and said what if she died suddenly, her ex re-married quickly and then died, and new wife would inherit not her daughter. The reply was ex couldn't cos he was still married to her - cue me and DH saying together 'he can if you're dead!'  

Silvertabby

Lets just say that my friend SAID that she had told the solicitors about the granddaughter when I pressed her on the subject - but she then said that it didn't matter if they knew or not, because she (my friend) was more entitled to her mother's money than a child she had never seen.  

Things got a lttle tense after her husband's death, because I informed RAF pensions (as he had asked me to do when he was putting his affairs in order).  There was a gap between stopping his pension and starting her (back dated) widow's pension, and she wished that I hadn't 'interfered' because if I hadn't 'told on her' she would have continued to be paid her husband's full pension 'and no-one would have been the wiser'.

I expect that the solicitors will have, amongst other things, advertised in the local newspapers, so possible that some info will feed back from that.

Keep_pedalling

Spendless said:

Though I accept people can be incredibly naïve/stupid  about intestacy rules. When sis-in law separated but didn't divorce her 2nd husband who was in a lot of debt, but also had a daughter (who was still a child) from her first marriage. We told her to get a will in place. She resisted  said that her ex wouldn't take from her daughter anyway - we pointed out his creditors would and then tried a different angle  to get us to believe us, and said what if she died suddenly, her ex re-married quickly and then died, and new wife would inherit not her daughter. The reply was ex couldn't cos he was still married to her - cue me and DH saying together 'he can if you're dead!'  

It never ceases to amaze me why so many people won’t make wills, and why people who most need them ( people with children from more than one relationship, unmarried couples, separated but still married couples) are the worst offenders.