DEAR ABBY by Abigail Van Buren<\/p>\n
DEAR ABBY: My mother passed away recently. She suffered from dementia and was a cancer survivor, but she lived well into her 80s. It was difficult for me to witness her mental decline when I spoke to her on the phone or visited her occasionally in the nursing home. She lived near my sister, so my sister had a much closer relationship with her than I did.\t<\/p>\n
Mom met with my sister and me several years ago to discuss her estate planning. Both of us were included as beneficiaries, as well as Mom\u2019s second husband. My sister has just informed me that, three years ago, Mom replaced the existing living trust with a new one making her the sole beneficiary. She smugly claimed that she was always there for Mother and that I was an absentee child. <\/p>\n
I was stunned to learn this while still recovering from the loss of my mother. I contacted a trust attorney, who told me I could contest the new trust on the grounds that Mother had dementia when it was prepared and that my sister may have coerced her to make her the sole beneficiary. <\/p>\n
If I pursue a lawsuit, it will undoubtedly drive a wedge between my family and my sister\u2019s family. On the other hand, doing nothing does not seem fair to my family. Please let me know what you think I should do. — SON IN CALIFORNIA\t<\/p>\n
DEAR SON: I cannot decide this for you. What I \u201cthink\u201d is that you should discuss this with your spouse (if you haven\u2019t already), decide how much you need the money you were originally promised and proceed from there. Regardless of what you do, your relationship with your sister will never be the same because of this.<\/p>\n
Dear Abby is written by Abigail Van Buren, also known as Jeanne Phillips, and was founded by her mother, Pauline Phillips. Contact Dear Abby at www.DearAbby.com or P.O. Box 69440, Los Angeles, CA 90069.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"DEAR ABBY by Abigail Van Buren DEAR ABBY: My mother passed away recently. She suffered from dementia and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":610556,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[64,63,99,186,184,185],"class_list":["post-610555","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-personal-finance","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-business","tag-finance","tag-personal-finance","tag-personalfinance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610555","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=610555"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610555\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/610556"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=610555"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=610555"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=610555"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}