Grandma had the most amazing china. Her three adult grand-children
continued to fight over who would get grandma’s china when she passed away. It
wasn’t the house, the car or the money that her three grand-children bickered
about, but rather the source of the commotion was Grandma’s fine china,
routinely used to serve dinner on the most special of occasions.
Unlike financial assets, which can generally be
divided easily among your heirs, tangible personal property is unique. And the complications
associated with distributing a lifetime’s worth of possessions is something
that many people overlook. Families have been torn apart over everything from
ownership of a valuable painting, to the grandfather clock, to the gun
collection, to who gets Mom’s recipe box. Sometimes the object in question is
an item of substantial material value, but just as often the appeal is purely
sentimental. People get emotionally attached to objects that symbolize the
person who has passed away.
Discussing these issues while parents and
grand-parents are still alive is preferable to letting children duke it out for
themselves later. Some people address this subject before they die, by giving
away possessions as they downsize, by asking which things have special meaning
to particular family members, or by leaving directions about how personal
property should be divided. Others have had adult children and grand-children express
their preferences by putting their names on the bottom of things while the
older generation is still alive.
If there are only one or two valuable possessions,
your estate plan might direct the executor of your will or the trustee of your
revocable living trust to sell the diamond or the painting, for example, and
divide the proceeds among your heirs. If one of them really wants a particular
item (like Grandma’s china) and has the funds, he or she could buy it from the
estate for fair market value. Another approach, if only one person asks for
certain expensive pieces, is to honor those wishes and reduce that heir’s share
of other assets. To steer clear of conflicts, designate an independent third
party to divide the assets.
For sentimental items that you want to go to
specific people, it’s best to say so in your estate planning documents. For
instance, in her will, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis directed that most of her
personal property go to her children, but she gave a handful of personal items
to other people. She left her longtime companion, Maurice Tempelsman, a Greek
alabaster head of a woman; her lawyer a copy of John F. Kennedy’s inaugural
address signed by Robert Frost; and a close friend a couple of Indian
miniatures.
The question is what to do about those sentimental
personal items. One possibility is to direct your heirs to divide belongings in
substantially equal shares and if they sell anything, to use the cash to
equalize things. Another is to map out a very specific rotation of choice – for
instance, by birth order – so that everyone gets a turn at having dibs on an
item.
No matter what you decide, make sure you make these
decisions in your estate plan. By
designating who will receive the china before she dies, Grandma can make sure
that her grand-children won’t come to blows and that the china will peaceably
pass to the next generation.
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