26 Jun
2024
26 Jun
'24
7:29 a.m.
This is almost completely unrelated but somewhat in the "write your
will/trust the right way".
My dad made me trustee of their estate. OK, fine. He passed first,
then my mom passed and there was a decent amount, not a lot but enough
you'd notice it. 3 kids, divided equally. But I had made enough money
that it seemed unfair to me to take my third when my brother, a PhD from
Cornell, was busy convincing everyone that how they were going about
saving the Everglades was wrong, and he was broke. I could just hear
my dad saying "Larry, you are fine, Chris is not".
So I gave him my third but it is a pain in the butt. You can only
gift so much each year without a tax implication.
The point being that none of the trust people had ever heard of, or
thought of, the idea that one of the kids would be willing to give
up their share.
Since we're mostly old folks, maybe put something in your trust that
says any kid can yield any portion to whoever they want and it is as
if you wrote that into the trust/will. We did that with our trust
and the lawyer had to be told 3 times. She kept saying that's not
what happens, the kids argue about they should get more, nobody
says they should get less. Turns out I'm the odd ball.
On Tue, Jun 25, 2024 at 08:56:43PM -0400, Aron Insinga wrote:
I am not a lawyer, but as I've mentioned before,
people building a
collection or creating a Museum should form a non-profit organization (with
a business plan to support it) to take ownership of it and keep it out of
the estate, because there is no guarantee one's heirs will give a $#!^ about
any of it other than for the gold that can be harvested from it.?? Do it
straight away because you likely won't know in advance of when your time is
up.
And even if all you have is one or a few items (let's say, a missile
guidance computer, or someone's unpublished notes from lectures) at least
make sure you have a valid will to try very hard to require it to be sent
someplace that can accept it, or that will appoint (a) right-thinking
representative(s) to handle said item(s).
Or at least make sure you've actually succeeded in educating your family on
the importance of said items, and places that can accept them.
As someone from the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum once said to me, "They
[TCM=>CHM] were lucky to get that, we don't have one."
But IMHO the LCM might be the biggest such failure of responsibility to
computing history ever.
Best,
- Aron (a docent at The Computer Museum when it was at DEC in Marlborough)
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Larry McVoy Retired to fishing http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat