Families should try and avoid inheritance disputes by planning their estates.
Estate planning is the preparation for the distribution and management of a person’s property and assets at death.
Estate planning could also take into account the management of a person’s properties and financial matters in the event that the person becomes incapacitated.
While estate planning does not guarantee the absence of family disagreements over inheritance, if done well, it can reduce the possibility of their occurrence and preserve the estate left behind.
Inheritance wars are not healthy at all. It is never easy to have brother against brother or sister or even parent against children over property.
It is not only highly emotive but could also result in injury and threats to life. Furthermore, court fees and legal costs escalate when people fight.
In the end, everyone gets bruised and honestly, the eventual outcome could have been achieved with minimum cost and pain if there was sobriety from the very beginning.
However much as there are many inheritance disputes that are reported in the media it is important to note that there are many more inheritance cases that are heard and passed by the courts without as much as a complaint from the families concerned.
Family members agree on how to share the property and they finalize the case in as short time as possible and at minimum cost.
While recent disputes in respect of estates where there are trusts have caused concern, it is important to note that that is a minority of the cases where such disputes occur. There are many other trusts that pass without any dispute whatsoever and people should be encouraged other than discouraged to set up trusts.
Will is the most popular mode of estate planning. It is an expression by a person of his or her wishes on how to distribute property upon their death.
A will only takes effect upon death and in the meantime, a person is free to deal with any property in the will. It is important to know that there are very many wills that pass without any objection.
Some wills are challenged because typically there are people who would be unhappy with the wishes of the dead person.
The attitude of the courts can be easily summed in the words of one Judge as follows: “The will of the departed must be honoured as much as it is reasonably possible. Readjustments of the wishes of the dead, by the living, must be spared for only eccentric and unreasonably harmful testators and weird wills. But in matters of normal preferences for certain beneficiaries or dependants, maybe for their special goodness to the testator, the court should not freely intervene to alter them.”
The writer is a family lawyer
