Sign up: AU Breaking News email<\/a><\/p>\nThe effect is what Adeline Schiralli, special counsel at Southern Waters Legal and a specialist in wills and estates, calls inheritance impatience \u2013 and it is playing out across socioeconomic groups. \u201cI\u2019ve seen very, very small estates where there have been disputes,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s more about the circumstances of the individuals bringing the claims.\u201d<\/p>\n
Those people may be acting on a kind of survival instinct, suggests Charlotte, as she looks for her own answers. \u201cWe\u2019ve set up a society whereby money matters so much, a house matters so much, that you can\u2019t see others\u2019 needs,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt just purely, simply comes down to greed for me. And I think you can hide greed under, \u2018Well, this is Mum\u2019s or Dad\u2019s wishes. This is what they wanted.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
For Mary-Ann de Mestre, a convener of succession law at Macquarie University and founder of M de Mestre Lawyers, an ageing population, complex estate structures and cost-of-living pressures have created \u201ca perfect storm where everyone is trying a different way to get their inheritance\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cInheritance disputes aren\u2019t just increasing, they\u2019re becoming more complex, more emotional,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
Remarriages and non-nuclear families are testing the boundaries of dependence and lineage, while with ageing can come the possibility of dementia and clashes about wills that take aim at the cognition of the testate.<\/p>\n
Technology is also creating curveballs in court, with text messages and digital notes submitted as evidence of a dead person\u2019s intentions and a booming online industry of AI-generated wills that are unable to comprehensively assess someone\u2019s mental capacity and independence as they formalise their last wishes.<\/p>\n
At De Mestre\u2019s practice in Sydney\u2019s northern beaches \u2013 where the interior is decorated in calming white and green \u2013 she sees clients investing time and energy into tidying up their estates well before they die as much as they do in preparing affairs for afterwards \u2013 known as \u201cpre-planning,\u201d and \u201cpost-planning\u201d. Here, death is less an ending than a point on a timeline \u2013 and money has an afterlife.<\/p>\n
\u2018A grief process layered with conflict\u2019<\/p>\n
De Mestre has observed more cases involving promissory estoppel \u2013 an informal promise that is relied upon after death. \u201cI was promised the business and it\u2019s now going to everyone,\u201d is a typical scenario. But there are other terms on which wills are being challenged at increasing rates.<\/p>\n
Vines senses people are \u201cmore likely to think \u2018I\u2019m entitled to get property from my parents\u2019 than they used to be\u201d. She admits that she is \u201ca bit impatient\u201d with well-off people in their 60s who want to fight about their late parents not bequeathing them money.<\/p>\n
A recurring theme is surprise. People are often shocked to discover that a will is not the final wordMary-Ann de Mestre, lawyer<\/p>\n
It\u2019s the court\u2019s job to supervise fairness in such cases. There, testamentary freedom \u2013 the right to choose who inherits your property \u2013 is balanced with moral responsibility, or the duty to provide for family and dependants.<\/p>\n
Family provision legislation, created to protect widows and children after the death of husbands, has expanded to the point that South Australia now recognises stepchildren as eligible applicants. De Mestre has seen an uptick in stepchildren, adult children and second partners making claims on wills because they feel unfairly done by. \u201cWhat originally was your will and your wishes is now open slather, almost,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
To dissuade some of the wilder claims on an inheritance, there are now repercussions for mounting a family provision case that doesn\u2019t have reasonable prospects \u2013 including, in the last 12 months, findings that demonstrate estates will no longer always cover the costs of legal action, and cost-capping. Mediation is mandatory in family provision cases in NSW.<\/p>\n
De Mestre tends to set up client family meetings to explain that an expected inheritance is not a fixed entitlement; what one might receive from a will is \u201cforever fluid\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cA recurring theme is surprise,\u201d she says. \u201cPeople are often shocked to discover that a will is not the final word, it is frequently just the opening move.\u201d<\/p>\n
She tells them: \u201cIf you get something, you\u2019re lucky and you should accept it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Her clients generally fall into two categories \u2013 those who come to realise they don\u2019t have the stomach to go ahead with litigation, and those who, out of principle, feel that something needs to be done.<\/p>\n
\u201cI often tell clients, \u2018This is not just a legal process, it is a grief process layered with conflict.\u2019 These cases are rarely about greed \u2013 they are about recognition, hurt, and unfinished family business.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2018Everything went to hell in a handbasket\u2019<\/p>\n
Then there are the many post-will family breakdowns that never make it to solicitors\u2019 offices. One case is that of Frankie*, who cut ties with her sister after her mother\u2019s decision to apportion 75% of her $20,000 estate to her sister and the remainder to her.<\/p>\n
It was never about the money, she says, but the way her mother\u2019s wishes were mishandled \u2013 drawn up using a cheap will kit that left more questions than answers \u2013 that really hurt.<\/p>\n
\u201cEverything went to hell in a handbasket because my mum didn\u2019t want to pay for legal advice,\u201d she says. \u201cIt was horrific.\u201d<\/p>\n
Time and time again, Vines has seen distressed, grief-stricken siblings making decisions in the heat of the moment.<\/p>\n
\u201cAll of their sibling rivalry, from when they were two, three, five, 10, 25 \u2013 all of that floods out,\u201d she says.\u201d So they\u2019d go into litigation and, next thing, the whole family is destroyed.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf we could stop people making the decision about suing close to the time that people had died, we might do better.\u201d<\/p>\n
It might help, too, if relatives on the brink of an inheritance quarrel could sit in on a meeting between a probate judge and sparring parties before a hearing, as Vines has done. She watched as the judge asked the counsel to run through the costs of the case, reaching about $90,000 for a matter that involved a three-day hearing. It mightn\u2019t have been a popular tactic among barristers but that particular judge had a high settlement rate.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s possible, she reasons, that younger generations\u2019 openness around the taboo of inheritance \u2013 that is, talking to one another before dying \u2013 may head off some disputes but \u201cyou\u2019re never going to fix really super dysfunctional families\u201d.<\/p>\n
Perhaps being clear about expectations, intentions and the value of relationships is best done when alive. Grudges may be taken to the grave but it\u2019s the living who have to deal with their fallout.<\/p>\n
Rachel* and her two sisters foresaw the prospect of a family imbroglio when their mother, in her 90s, began to agitate to cut her only son out of her will. The extra money would have helped Rachel\u2019s family but also would have come at too high a cost.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe thought it was unfair,\u201d says Rachel, who is in her 60s and is from Sydney. \u201cHe\u2019d be devastated, he didn\u2019t really understand the depth of what she felt about him. She\u2019d be gone and the living would have to deal with the consequences.\u201d<\/p>\n
Their mother eventually dropped the idea.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe will never tell him. He would be really, really, really upset. Writing one of your children out of your will is really difficult \u2013 the message it sends is horrendous.\u201d<\/p>\n
*Names have been changed<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It wasn\u2019t until Charlotte\u2019s* father died that she learnt he had changed his will to leave his entire…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":479098,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[45,49,48,133,131,132],"class_list":["post-479097","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-personal-finance","tag-business","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-finance","tag-personal-finance","tag-personalfinance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/479097","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=479097"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/479097\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/479098"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=479097"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=479097"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=479097"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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$5.4 trillion will soon be inherited in Australia. What does this mean for equality? \u2013 video<\/p>\n