Letters to the Editor
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Honor the stated wishes and the hard work of the executor
Dealing with money and stuff fairly and equitably in murky situations is hard work, even if nobody sues. It's stressful for the people having to distribute the assets and the worldly goods if even one person tangentially involved gets upset about the process. I know this for a fact, having had to distribute the worldly possessions of my best friend after she died.
The will was clear enough for the executor. Honor the stated wishes of the grandmother. Honor the executor's decision. There is no ethical issue with keeping the money. TAKE THE GRANDMOTHER AT HER WORD. LW owes nothing in this to the ex, not legally, not morally, not ethically. Stop taking care of him.
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Just Split it in Half
Give half to ex, take half. Be done with it.
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I Must Be a Moral Monster
I keep butting up against the feeling that many of us are dissing an old woman. Why? Because she was old enough to die, does that mean she had no mind?
Why is everyone second-guessing this woman's wishes? Deciding how to dispose of your assets, what gestures you want to make and to whom, may be one of the final dignities and pleasures in life.
I think it was a kind thing to do and there is no reason to start second-guessing this old woman's wishes. She had a right to make a gift.
I feel the LW has the right to receive the gift.
Best thing to do with it is make a gift of it that honors the woman who gave it.
It's offensive to treat the elderly woman dismissively as "grandma", who of course didn't know her own mind.
Damned if I'd want anybody doing that with my will after I'm gone. It'd be an insult to my memory. Imo, LW should accept it with humility and grace as a member of the dead woman's human family.
Enough.
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WWSD (What Would Santa Do?) -- Part I
Being somewhat in your ex-grandmother-in-law’s shoes (though thankfully not to the extent of being dead), my perspective may add something to what other readers have already said. Following is the text of my Christmas present last year to my nuclear-plus-one family members. It is similar to your ex-gran-in-law’s will, except that instead of divvying up real money after bad fortune, it divvies up Monopoly money after good fortune. I’ll let you take a moment to read through it:
2006 CHRISTMAS BULLSHIT BOND
ISSUE DATE: December 25, 2006
ISSUER: Bank of Destitution
PAYEE: _______________________________
REDEMPTION CLASS: ____
REDEMPTION CLASSES: S=sibling/sibling-in-law/sort-of-sibling-in-law, N=niece/nephew/sort-of-niece-nephew, E=ex-girlfriend, P=parent (equivalent to S for purposes of this contract)
REDEMPTION DATE: Any day from January 1, 2007, to December 31, 2017, inclusive
REDEMPTION AMOUNT: 1/23 of 30% of issuer’s after-tax income in excess of $10,000 in the preceding calendar year, provided no grave unforeseen emergencies make this impossible
PAYMENT CONDITIONS: S Class, E Class: None. N Class: Payee must earn redemption amount at a rate of $40 per hour doing some sort of good-faith (i.e. non-bullshit) work to be decided on by mutual agreement between issuer and payee per the conditions below
PAYMENT SCHEDULE: S Class, E Class: Immediately. N Class: If 21 or over at time of redemption, after performance of work; if 18 – 20, in 4 quarterly payments after performance of work; if 17 or younger, in 8 quarterly payments after performance of work
BULLSHIT: The 2006 Christmas Bullshit Bond is a non-transferable bullshit security instrument whose purpose is to make one lazy bum – the issuer – look like Ebenezer Scrooge after a night out of drinking holiday shots with the Ghost of Christmas Future. Do not get your hopes up that it will yield any money! That said, the 2006 Christmas Bullshit Bond is not a complete joke, either. It is a legally binding document on the issuer that could someday yield moderate rewards (just as someday pigs may fly out of the issuer’s ass). To preserve good holiday cheer in this and future seasons, the legal obligations on the issuer shall be construed on the basis of good faith and reasonableness among all parties.
PAYEE’S GAMBLE: This bond is not a real bond in the traditional sense of steadily gaining interest each year until the time of payout. Instead, each year the payee has to look at how much money the issuer has earned in the preceding year and either cash in his 1/23rd share of 30% of the issuer’s after-tax after-$10,000-expenses earnings for that year or wait until the next year in hopes that the issuer will earn more and the payee thus cash in more. As an example, the payee wouldn’t want to cash in his Christmas bond in 2007 because the issuer made less than $3,000 after taxes in 2006 and the payee wouldn’t get anything. If, on the other hand, the issuer were to win a million dollars in the lottery sometime in the next 10 years (worth about $500,000 after taxes), that is the year the payee would probably want to cash in his Christmas bond, since he would receive approximately $6,391.
N-CLASS DOWNSIDE: Why should the 12 N-Class recipients of 2006 Christmas Bullshit Bonds have to work to get their money while the 10 S-Class and 1 E-Class recipients do not? Because the issuer is an aging self-righteous hopelessly square hypocritical jerk? On the bright side, N-Class recipients will be earning their bond reward at the rate of $40 an hour, and the issuer will be very liberal and flexible on the definition of work. It does have to be work, but it needn’t be onerous (though that is one of the classical definitions of work), and it certainly doesn’t have to be for the issuer. The only thing the issuer will be inflexible on is if the bond recipient, having drawn up a simple plan on what he proposes to do, does a half-assed job or tries to cheat. Screw with Santa, and Santa pays squat.
HIDDEN CONDITIONS: One further reasonable condition, conveyed in private, has been placed on one of the payees.
MERRY CHRISTMAS: Many happy returns.
EXECUTED BY: Santa Claus, Bank of Destitution, December 24, 2006
[Continued...]
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WWSD (What Would Santa Do?) -- Part II
Obviously if I win the lottery, whether it be vocational or redistributional, I won’t be giving any of it away to my relatives, Christmas bond or no Christmas bond. (That’s why it’s called a "Bullshit Bond".) I will be sneaking off to the Bahamas where nobody can find me and secretly wishing them the best of luck. But let’s assume that something goes wrong and their lawyers are too smart for me. There’s a good chance that I could then find myself in the same predicament as your deceased ex-gran-in-law. If any of my siblings have split up with their current spouses or significant others, will I want the latter to sacrifice their 2006 Christmas Bullshit Bonds to the former? Only if the latter have behaved abominably. And certainly not if my siblings have behaved abominably. My in-laws wouldn’t have gotten anything had they not entered the nuclear relativity field, but my gift is not intended to bind them there in the absence of love. So if I were your ex-gran-in-law, and you had behaved as honorably as you claim – sometimes we fool ourselves – I would say, "No, dearie, you keep that money. I wouldn’t have given it to you if I didn’t want you to have it." But that’s just me, and of course I deal in charity derivatives, not the cold hard liberated cash of your poor ex-relative.
There remains the fascinating question of what to do with your windfall. If I were in your shoes (which is to say, if you were in mine, which have holes in the bottom because I’m too poor to buy new ones and too depressed at the moment to rejoin the rat fest), I’m pretty sure I would keep it all for myself. But since it’s your money, I can afford to be generous: 25% to an emergency fund to be guarded by some stingy bastard like Bill Gates; 25% to whatever you want after a three month cooling off period (think of it as economic foreplay); 25% to yesterday’s two hard luck cases (perhaps a 20:80 split between Monsieur Ennui and Mademoiselle Mon Dieu, she of the paralytic-whiplash/light-industrial-mangling/cervical-cancer/breast-cancer/Cinderella-relatives quinfecta) provided a) they submit to the kind of Trumanesque accounting scrutiny that the U.S. Congress and U.S. Press have so criminally failed to apply to Master Bush and Co. over the last seven years and b) they work for their money in some interesting yet-to-be-determined cause at a rate of $15 to $20 per hour; and finally 25% to an American War Crimes Expiation Fund to resettle Afghani and Iraqi refugees from America’s genocidal Middle Eastern oil piracy.
I caught by accident Sunday’s 60 Minutes special on America’s enormous compassion for the people of Iraq and all that we have sacrificed (like 750,000 Iraqi lives, Iraqi stability, Iraqi infrastructure, the Iraqi standard of living…). Of the 1.8 million internal and 2 million external refugees created by our Hitlerite seizure of Iraq’s oil fields – 3.8 million total refugees plus another .7 million relocated to local morgues out of a population of 25 million -- our great-hearted nation has taken in 466 with firm assurances from the Commander-in-Chief – he who cannot tell a lie – to take in 6,534 more. The Arabs may not love us, but at least the Germans are grateful for giving them their self-esteem back. Compare this to what America did for the Jews during the Third Reich. We had no special obligation to take any of them in, but we did. Roughly one third of the 700,000 immigrants to the U.S. between 1931 and 1945 were Jewish. The Gypsies, who lost between 27% and 50% of their population to Hitler (compared to 35% for the Jews), got no immigration slots, and the Ukrainians, who lost around 40% of their population to Stalin and Hitler combined, i.e. 14 million people versus 6 million for the Jews, also got no immigration slots. But in this criminal war of nuclear-armed robbery against Iraq, America IS morally obligated to take in every Iraqi refugee who would like to come, and perhaps every Afghani refugee, as well. The Afghanis sacrificed 1 million citizens for us in the last battle of the Cold War, and the least we can do is give them access to the freedom and security for which they died. Absorbing, in the worst case scenario, 50 million Middle Eastern refugees would be a challenge. But if the West Germans could increase the population of their country by a factor of 1.29 through reannexation of East Germany after Gorbachev’s Decommission of the Soviet Empire in 1991, why should we Americans, "Nation of Immigrants", have a problem increasing our population by a factor of 1.17? The real challenge would be the transportation costs. At $1,500 per refugee, they come to $75 billion. That’s…omigod, 4% of our current $2 trillion invasion cost. Perhaps instead of adding $4 trillion more by expanding World War IV to Iran, we could just give everybody who wants one a free pass to Disneyworld. At $90 billion it would be a hell of a lot cheaper, in money, blood, and morality.
Managing all this by yourself would be difficult, but there again you are in luck. Cary Tennis’s readership, currently somewhere between a Heckler’s Club and an Advice Club, could relocate to somewhere between a Disaster Club and a New Deal Club. I’m sure that between Salon’s Jim Jonesian corporate leadership and the frailties of Cary’s readers this club would come to no better end than any other 1960s commune, but it might hold together long enough to help you pass on your good fortune.
Congratulations and have fun.