When her father died in 2003, Barbara Kate Repa had been an attorney for 22 years. She'd written often about eldercare issues and coauthored advanced versions of WillMaker, computer software that allows people to make their own wills and other legal documents, such as advance health care directives.
But when it came to her own parents, Repa and her siblings had never quite managed to broach the topic of legal planning for end-of-life issues. Given her father's personality, they had just assumed he had all that taken care of.
"My dad was the world's most fastidious person," says Repa (in the photo above at her law school graduation, with parents Frank and Vera), "the kind who had all his hangers hanging the same way, his shoes all organized. He labeled the shelves in the medicine cabinet by various body parts, like 'head' and 'shoulders.'"
Frank Repa also had a lockbox of folders that he kept in a closet. "We all just assumed he was very carefully keeping track of the deeds to the house, his will -- all of that. When he died, we took it down and what was in there were $20 bills he was putting aside for each of the kids for Christmas. No wills, no nothing."
Repa, of course, was rather embarrassed. More importantly, she says, "It was a huge mess. We had to go to court and it took many months and lots of wrangling just to get things like his insurance and stock in my mom's name. If we had had just a couple of conversations about it, all of that could have been avoided."
Like many adult children, Repa and her siblings had gingerly avoided those conversations because they thought their parents didn't want to have them. "My parents are very Midwestern, so there's this sense that it's a private matter and you don't pry into things, and my dad was very sort of buttoned-up that way. I also think a lot of kids are hesitant to bring up that conversation because it feels like it makes them look grabby."
But Repa realized that ultimately her father would have wanted to leave things organized and taken care of. "I think we could have just approached the conversation that way," she says. "We should have said something like, 'Let's just make sure the i's are dotted and the t's are crossed here. Can we sit down and figure that out so that things happen the way you want them to happen?'"
Read the full interview with Barbara Kate Repa.
Best not to beat yourself up too hard. There may well have been nothing you could have done to get your mother's husband to be more loose-lipped about his assets and plans for distributing them. In fact, that's one big reason some people prefer to have their property pass through a trust rather than a will: Unlike wills, trust documents need not be made public. Many of the best estate plans have both a trust and a backup or pour-over will that between them cover all the property a person owns at death. However, even in the best-laid plans, there is sometimes some slippage, much like what you found, when a person has only a trust and neglects or forgets to put later-acquired property into the trust. Perhaps—just perhaps—you could have appealed to your step-dad by emphasizing to him that you were sure you would want your mom, his longtime spouse, to be free from the hassle of tracking down and transferring title to property after his death and could have encouraged him to have his plans reviewed by an outside objective expert, such as an estate planning attorney or financial planner.
My mother's husband was a step father. When asked about his finances, he said it was listed in his trust. His trust listed various savings, mutual funds, anuities etc. but no one knew what they were worth. He did not have any children of his own. He did not tell my mother what he had. Now we find out that many things were not in joint-tenancee and that there were other assets not listed in the trust. They were married for 30 years. Since he is not a blood relative, what else could we have done?