How to Get Back at Your Spouse and Children from the Grave

While I was on The Wealthy Barber podcast, we discussed estate planning steps you should do if you care about your family.  But what if you want the opposite?  Maybe you’re looking for revenge.  Here’s a guide.

Don’t bother with a will

A will is a chance to clearly state who should get your money and property when you die.  Having a will speeds up the process of distributing your assets.  But if you don’t have a will, you could add months or years to how long it takes for your spouse or children to get the money they need.

In one interesting case, an elderly lady with two daughters and a son didn’t want the estranged son to get anything.  So, she told her daughters this, but didn’t have a will.  Somehow, the daughters were supposed to keep all the money and property for themselves, despite laws saying the brother is entitled to his share.  The potential for fireworks was exciting.  Unfortunately, one of the daughters persuaded the mother to get a will.  When the mother passed, the estate passed smoothly to the daughters with barely any entertainment.

Most of the people without a will think that their family will get along and do reasonable things with the estate.  People think their heirs will get to make decisions rather than it all being decided by laws and the courts.  These people are misguided and should get a will.  However, there is a small minority of people who know how estates without wills can become a huge mess, and they’re happy to inflict hardship on their annoying family.

Don’t get power of attorney documents

Some people get power of attorney documents, one for property and one for personal care.  If a person becomes mentally incapable, these documents allow a trusted person to make decisions for them.  This works well for those who care about their families.

But what if you want to cause trouble?  Imagine a child watching you in a hospital bed, but the child has no authority to tell the doctors what you want.  The child could try to get legal authority, but that takes time.  In the meantime, the child gets to just watch and see what the doctors choose to do.

As for property, while you’re in a hospital bed, your greedy child may have to just sit and watch while your bank accounts get drained paying for things you no longer need.  This is a great way to add extra pain during a difficult time.

If you have a will, leave instructions that cause problems

An elderly lady with a son and daughter took care of her son for his whole life.  He’s not incapable; he’s combative, lazy, likes his drugs, and feels entitled to his mother’s home and other possessions.  The daughter is capable and independent.  The mother had a will naming the daughter as executor, but wouldn’t let the daughter see it.

After the mother died, the daughter was left with quite a mess.  The home is a triplex with units for the brother, mother, and a renter.  A provision in the will is that the brother is to be allowed to stay rent-free in the triplex as long as he wants in addition to getting his share of the estate.

It’s clear that the mother wanted to put the daughter in a position forcing her to take care of the brother indefinitely.  The daughter could try to sell the triplex and walk away, but it’s not easy to sell a triplex when the new owner has a combative renter who must be allowed to stay rent-free.

The daughter has been working at getting herself free of this mess for a year now, and likely has more years of work to do.  This is just the kind of thing you can spring on an unsuspecting child if you never let the child see your will.  

One option is to let the executor and heirs see your will and have a discussion about who gets what and why. They’re less likely to fight with each other if they hear directly from you who gets certain prized possessions. That’s what you do if you like them.  If you want to cause trouble, this elderly lady’s approach is a model for you.

Be a hoarder

You can add a lot of extra stress to an executor’s job by leaving a house filled with literal tons of useless junk.  Few people think they’re hoarders, but most of us keep a lot of junk we don’t need, particularly as we age.

Of the mountain of useless stuff my father kept, the hardest to deal with was all the paper.  He kept every copy of multiple newspapers, all his junk mailings, and almost all other paper that ever came into his possession.  Back in the days when paper for recycling had to be taken to a recycling depot, all this paper filled my car’s trunk, back seat, and passenger seat almost ten times.

The worst part was that the papers were hopelessly mixed up, and I knew he had papers worth keeping.  For example, he had the telegram his grandmother received when my great uncle died in World War I.  But it was in a stack that mixed bank statements from different decades with many other papers.  It took me 15 weekends to do a quick pass through the paper to whittle it down to a meter-high stack to look at later.

Other estates my wife and I have handled have been less extreme than this, but they’ve all had piles of junk we’ve had to sort through.  This added stress at an already stressful time.

If you care about your family, throw away junk nobody needs.  This isn’t something you can do just sitting and thinking.  To a first approximation, you should probably keep anything you can think of.  It’s the things you’ve forgotten about buried in the basement, garage, shed, or the back of a closet that you should have a look at and throw away.  But if you don’t like your family, hoard away.

Don’t let your spouse get a credit history

When a couple have a single credit card account with two separate cards, only the owner of the account gets a credit history.  This is true even if the cards have different names on them.  One of my aunts had what she thought was her own credit card for decades.  When her husband died, the account was closed and she had no credit.

What was worse was that she was turned down for a new credit card.  She was angry and confused.  She went to her bank branch to talk to the manager to get this fixed.  Of course, this 1970s approach made no difference.  Banks don’t work that way any more.  The best she could do was to get a low-limit secured credit card, as though she was a teenager, and start to build a credit history.  She found the entire saga humiliating.

I doubt that her husband intended for all this to happen, but if he did, it was brilliant.  Surviving spouses have a lot to deal with as they struggle with loss.  They may have access to certain accounts blocked initially, and they need to learn how to handle financial matters their deceased spouses used to handle.  Taking away a survivor’s credit card as well adds to the difficulty.

Keep secret accounts

In the estates my wife and I have handled, it’s been surprisingly difficult to locate all the deceased’s financial accounts.  In some cases, we walked into small town bank branches to see if any of the tellers recognized the deceased.  In another case, I got help from a blog reader to trace what happened to a particular transaction to see if it went into some account I didn’t know about.

It’s a good idea to leave an up-to-date list of information an executor of power of attorney would need to handle your affairs.  Some people refer to this as “the binder.”  But don’t bother if you want to leave problems in your wake.