Pre-Emptive Action as Beneficiary of Trust

[TrustUser]

i realize that. what she wants to do with her own funds (that which she had before she married) is her right. she would also have the right to enjoy the assets and spend the income. but not ownership of them. i think i am being entirely fair, in this regard. and i am absolutely positive that if i was in this position, i would specifically tell my spouse that i do not want ownership of her assets when she dies. if she still gave them to me, then i would give them to her kids, upon my death. because it is the right thing to do.

 

[TrustUser]

LOL...what?!

How does this speculative generalization help the OP?

this is my last comment. i only made them because the thread wandered off into a general discussion of 2nd spouses inheriting, etc.

 

[Taxing Matters]

if she still gave them to me, then i would give them to her kids, upon my death. because it is the right thing to do.

That is indeed exactly what a lot of couples I see do. They make sure that the surviving spouse of the first to die is taken care and not left destitute and then when the second spouse dies, they have an agreed distribution of assets among whatever kids each had, whatever charities they favor, etc. In other words, they work together on the estate planning. Unfortunately a lot of them do not tell the kids that, leaving the kids to speculate how it is that the new spouse got everything upon the death of their parent. And as people tend to do, particularly these days, the kids start by leaping to the worst motives and intentions of the second spouse, making him or her the villain. In other words, the kids fall back into the classic evil step parent of kid's fairy tales they heard growing up. That's how we end up seeing kids on these boards castigating the step parent as a gold digger when in most cases that is not the case.

Certainly some gold diggers are out there. But they are not typically the ones who marry someone at midlife and have to potentially spend 20, 30, 40 years with their spouse. That's a lot of time to wait to get their hands on the assets, and that assumes that the gold digger's spouse actually dies first and that the deceased spouse actually had a lot of assets at death to pass on. In a lot of cases it won't turn out quite as they expect. A lot of things can happen over a period of decades. Most gold diggers in my experience don't find it worthwhile to spend decades in a marriage in the hope they'll get a big pay off at the end. There is just too much risk that it won't work out as they expect and too long to get their pay off and enjoy it. The more common tactic is for them to look for someone who has money and has not a long time to live. That means putting less time into the "investment" and more certainty of coming out of it with a nice payoff.

 

[commentator]

May I make a slight comment here on behalf of "next wives" everywhere? Keep in mind that the big pay off at the end of it just might be severely diminished by the fact that the OP's father is in his high eighties and is showing signs of dementia. There might not be any estate to worry about if he requires extensive late in life dementia care. Elder care is not only burdensome, it is very expensive. If there were no younger stepmother to drive him around, live with him and provide/oversee care for him, it would be the responsibility of the others involved, his children. If he were to require companions, caregivers, this would cost a lot of money. If he were to get in the condition that he requires actual care in a nursing or memory care facility, that property, those assets, could melt like snow in the desert.

A big responsibility that a spouse, especially a younger spouse assumes is the care of a person who may live in the course of a lifetime to be very old and require a lot of care. Expensive care. That's one of the aspects of marrying an older person than yourself involves. If she has stayed with him for twenty years, she has probably enhanced the quality of his final years, and that is what he is funding. If she had not been here, the children might have found themselves with many more responsibilities. I hope he has taken steps to arrange things so that she is well taken care of during the rest of her life as well.