No. of Recommendations: 12
It's interesting how death tends to bring out the worst in some people. During the decade between when my father-in-law died and the death of my mother-in-law, I pretty much guided his (now her) investment potfolio. She passed away at the tail end of the Great Recession. My wife's sister was all bent out of shape because I wasn't "family" and she should have been making the decisions and she threatened to sue. I gave her paperwork which showed that, despite having just transversed the most financially debilitating period since 1929, the estate had doubled in value since her father's demise and suggested that she give the records to whichever attorney she selected.
My mother-in-law had a number of pieces of gold jewelry and a couple of gold Krugerrands. I fooled around with a kitchen scale and determined that the pile of gold jewelry had the same gold contnet as the two coins. I recommended that my wife offer her a choice of the two options and predicted she would take the handful of pieces which constituted the "pile" because it appeared larger. She spent five hours running around the neighborhood from jeweler to jeweler to determine the value of each of the pieces and then took the pile. About a week later she accused my wife of cheating her by using that process, but never explained why or how.
Some people just make you want to scratch your head.
As a seperate note, I have reecently spent a feww hours documenting where all the skeletons are hidden to assist whoeever has the job of dealing with our estate. My parents never shared or documented their hiding places and when the later of the two passed on, I had the job of searching their house for various caches of valuables in weird places (and likely didn't find them all).
Jeff
