J
jkl
Guest
My mother died in 1975 without a will. By the laws of the state we inherited 1/2 of the community property ( house, acreage, cars, farm equipment, etc.). The deeds and titles all remained as they were. My father remarried a few years later. He died in 1997 with a will. The way way he wrote the will it sounded as if all the property was his all along even though he willed us the property. He also left a life estate of the house to his wife at the time. My question is how can she have 100% control of the house when we had already inherited 1/2 of the house in 1975? Also if this is so we want to buy out the life estate to settle the rest of the property. We need some method of determining the value of the life estate and would the value be based on 1/2 or as a whole?