Guest Post From Andrea: Estate Planning So Your Executor Doesn’t Desecrate Your Grave

This is a guest post from Andrea. Andrea lives in the backwoods of northern Virginia with a small menagerie, where she fritters her life away reading, hiking Civil War battlefields, and surfing the internet when the weather allows her primitive satellite connection to stay up. She’s involved in social justice, battlefield preservation, and is foolish enough to try going to school full time while holding down a full time job that requires a 100 mile daily commute. You can catch her blogging this idyllic life over at the Manor of Mixed Blessings (posts there have no redeeming social value).

Back at the end of January, my estranged father passed away intestate (without a will). He was also divorced. This meant that I was his sole heir, and also got saddled with being the executrix of his estate. And let me tell you, I had good reasons for being estranged from the man but prior to his death I didn’t really loathe him. After his death, I most certainly do. Disposing of his estate has been a nightmare of flailing around trying to piece together the financial life of a man I didn’t know, who lived a 12-hour drive west of me, kept every single piece of paper ever in a series of various boxes and drawers, and apparently did not communicate anything to anyone, ever. It is no lie when I say to you that I am contemplating making the 12-hour drive to visit his grave JUST so I can have a dog pee on it.

This has led me to the conclusion that you can handle your estate in one of three ways: you can hire a lawyer to be your executor, you can saddle the person you most dislike in the world with the duty, or you can set things up such that whoever does it does not end up with a burning desire to resurrect you just so they can choke you. It’s the third one I want to tell you about; there’s some very, very basic things you can do that will make life a lot easier for your executor when you’re gone. My advice is necessarily US-centric because I have no experience being an executrix anywhere else in the world.

The first is make a will. In it, specify who you want to be your executor. Get that person’s agreement. I cannot stress this enough. Do not surprise some poor bastard with the news that they will now have to handle disposing of your estate, even if you are the most organized person on the planet. It’s cruel and unusual and no fun for the person you’ve just surprised nastily.

The second is start making lists. You need to make a list of every bank where you have a financial account and every insurance policy you have. This list needs to include the telephone number and address of the institution where the account or policy is located, and the account or policy number. For insurance policies, list the amount of the payout and the beneficiary. Give the beneficiary’s contact information, as well. For financial accounts, if possible keep a copy of the latest account statement with this list.

For that matter, keep all your financial information in one place and organize that crap. It doesn’t have to be complicated, it doesn’t even have to be in alphabetical order, but folders labeled with the names of the banks or companies with any and all correspondence stuck in them will be useful as hell to the person cleaning up after you’re dead.

Make multiple copies of your will and your list. Put a copies in a folder labeled “OPEN WHEN I’M DEAD” or similar and keep it with your financial folders. Consider giving copies to your executor if they’re the kind of person you trust with that information. Take all your folders of financial information, your OPEN WHEN I’M DEAD folder, and put them in a sturdy box. Plastic, for a preference, because it does not decay and fall apart like cardboard and is easier to lift than a fireproof safe. Label the box in large letters “IMPORTANT FINANCIAL INFORMATION” or similar and stick it wherever you like, but tell your executor where to look. Keep these files up to date, particularly that list.

Now sit down and make yourself another list. This one is a list of everyone who sends you a regular bill: phone companies, utility companies, landlord, credit cards, loans, whatever. It should look a lot like your other list, only labeled “BILLS” instead of “WHERE I BURIED THE MONEY”. Give the company/person’s name, their contact information, and your account number. If the bill is a static amount, list the amount. Stick this list in your OPEN WHEN I’M DEAD folder.

If you have an online presence, you may want to make a list with the URLs, account names, and passwords.

Make one last list, finally. Call this one “People Who Will Want To Know I’m Dead”. It’s pretty self-explanatory and should include names and contact information. Put it in your OWID folder and keep it updated as people move, change phones, or ditch one e-mail address for another.

If at all possible, make arrangements to pay for your funeral ahead of time. Your bank accounts will be tied up in probate for months even if things go quite smoothly, so if you haven’t pre-paid for a funeral ask yourself how your family is going to pay for the arrangements you want made. Consider, if you have a terminal illness, adding your executor to your bank account as a joint tenant with rights of survivorship (this is the only thing my dead estranged father did right), which will give them the ability to access that account without having to worry about probate.

Let me tell you how my estranged father’s death went, without all of this. I got the call that he was dead and had to plan his funeral arrangements from some 800 miles east of where he died. Luckily his sister was willing to put the costs of his cremation and memorial service on her credit card. I then packed my husband and puppy in the car and we drove twelve hours west, attended the memorial service, and then had to clean out my dead estranged father’s apartment and try to track down who all needed to know he was dead.

I had exactly 5 days off work, and one Honda CR-V which also had to carry me, my husband, the puppy, and our luggage. Time and space were at a premium. My husband and I moved through that small apartment like a hurricane, looking for any meaningful family artifacts and any important paperwork. We had four 15-gallon or so Tupperware containers we filled up. Because papers were everywhere, we just collected anything and everything and dumped it in the “Paperwork” Tupperware bin. Family oddments I actually wanted went in the other three.

And then, because I was fortunate, I was able to hire a lawyer who had everything left in the apartment taken care of, including the motorscooter. Meanwhile the husband, the puppy, and I drove twelve hours home where I started digging through the paperwork so I could tell the lawyer what the estate consisted of, financially. I called, I am not shitting you, three different retirement programs plus the Social Security Administration. I called the phone company. I dug through my dead estranged father’s personal mail and tracked down his regular correspondents and notified them. I provided what I believed to be a complete list of assets to the lawyer, and he got an order to dispense with administration of the estate, and then two months later one of the retirement programs sends me a letter to tell me there’s $36,000 in assets with them that they need to distribute but they won’t so much as tell me who the beneficiary is without a copy of the order to dispense with administration specifically listing those assets. Which I do not have, because when I called them and informed them of my estrange father’s death, they said nothing about these assets. Helpful. Very helpful.

At this point my estranged father has taken up significantly more of my time and energy dead than he ever did alive, and the whole process strikes me as a perfect example of the kind of self-centered assholery that made me decide I was better off without him in my life. I regret, at this point, allowing his ashes to be buried rather than taking custody of them so I could use them as litter box filler. Do not be my dead estranged father. Your heirs may be more on the ball than I am and you may spend eternity soaking up cat urine. Sit down, and start making some lists.

29 April, 2011 – 3:03 pm | By Distinguished Guest | Posted in Servicey | Tagged |

Every Animal Has A Story

There’s a narrative in the animal welfare community that’s been particularly irking me lately. With millions of homeless and unwanted animals across the United States, shelters facing budget cuts and declining donations, many regions are facing a crisis with animals in need of homes, and nowhere to go. Yet, this is rarely covered. The media occasionally discusses shelter crowding and related issues, but what it usually focuses on is animals with A Story. And every time it does, the coverage inevitably notes that once the story of the animal was publicised, requests to help, and often to adopt, flooded in from all over the nation, and sometimes from different countries.

Apparently a homeless and unwanted animal becomes important when ou attracts the attention of a journalist and can be hyped up in the media. And apparently people who mostly do nothing about the crisis with animal shelters in the United States suddenly feel inspired to adopt by reading a story. I wonder, you know, what happens to all the people who can’t adopt these animals; do they go to their local shelters and decide to bring home a dog or cat, to save an animal who needs their help but doesn’t have a flashy narrative? Because I suspect that they don’t.

And I also have to wonder what they were doing before. Where are they for the homeless animals in their community? Where are they when animals in their own community need help? Where are they when shelters in their own communities need help from members of the public and issue appeals for assistance? Why does a homeless animal only matter when ou comes with a horrific, frustrating, angering story attached?

I think this speaks to a larger problem in the United States when it comes to how people think not just about animal welfare issues, but also social justice for humans. And that is the tendency to personalise it and make it an individual problem, rather than to examine the institutions that lead to it. It’s the tendency to think that things can be solved by addressing situations on an individual level, rather than by confronting the much larger systems behind them.

When people focus on one homeless animal to the exclusion of others, that animal certainly gets help. When members of the public donate thousands of dollars so a dog can have expensive orthopedic surgery, that dog certainly gets help, instead of a death sentence. But what about all the other animals? This country euthanises millions of healthy dogs and cats every year because no one wants them. It kills millions of animals because it doesn’t know what else to do with them. How does helping one animal, one sad case, address this problem?

It doesn’t. If anything, it makes the situation worse because people feel good about themselves for sending $10 to the fund to help the cat with horrible injuries from animal abuse, and then their sense of civic duty subsides and they can return to whatever they were doing before. They don’t have to stop and wonder why so many animals are homeless, they don’t have to consider their own complicity in the situation animals face in the United States.

When people publicise and talk about these sad cases, they miss the fact that thousands of cases like this are happening right now, are ongoing, and no one’s talking about them. Maybe the abused animal escapes and dies quietly in the woods somewhere. Maybe the shelter takes one look and euthanises because it doesn’t know what else to do and knows, in that cold hard metric you learn when you work for shelters, that the costs for care would be too much to justify with hundreds of other animals in need. Maybe a member of the media doesn’t happen by to put the animal on the front page and suggest that readers of the paper help out by sending some money the shelter’s way. Money often earmarked specifically for that animal, so the shelter can’t do anything to help the other animals it has, and ends up sitting on a pile of funds it cannot use.

Personalising institutional violence is a way to make people feel good. It turns it into a small, digestible thing that is easy for people to cope with because they don’t need to think outside themselves. They can send money to the appeal or talk about how sad it all is over brunch and then forget about it. For animal welfare advocates, who work with cases like this on a daily basis, who struggle to get people to pay attention to the huge problems with the way this country handles animals in need, it is a frustrating, constant reminder that the only way to get any attention is to parade an animal with A Story before members of the public to get them to care.

Every animal has a story. Every animal matters. And we all play a role in the way this country deals with animals, from the number of animals your county shelter kills each week because it doesn’t have enough space to, yes, the animal that ends up in the paper because the abuse ou endured was so horrific and unusual that even shelter workers, used to the acts of people who treat animals like disposable objects, blanched. We are all a part of this.

And we are all complicit in the fact that people feel obliged to personalise the stories of abused, abandoned, and unwanted animals in order to get people to care. This is on us. It is our need for animals with Stories that drives this. Every time people flock to help a single animal they read about in the news or saw on the television, while ignoring the other animals that need help, well, that’s on us too.

29 April, 2011 – 10:38 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in animals | Tagged |

Questing Radiators

Dave Devine at Tucson Weekly: Government in Action

A Republican push to slash health-care programs as part of the recently adopted 2012 state budget is either “balanced” or “devastating,” depending upon who’s talking.

Scott Wittkopf at Isthumus: Michigan-style financial bill may still be in the works for Wisconsin

After “financial martial law” was enacted in Michigan in the midst of the Wisconsin protests over Gov. Scott Walker’s anti-union agenda, questions started bubbling as to whether or not similar legislation was in the works for the Badger State.

Samantha Power at Vue: Closed door policy

While the Conservative party campaign boasts of the highest rates of immigration in 50 years, the facts aren’t quite supporting the claim, though that hasn’t stopped the Conservatives from launching an aggressive campaign attempting to secure the votes of Canada’s diverse ethnic communities.

Kate Giammarise at Pittsburgh City Paper: GOP lawmakers pushing restrictive welfare-reform bills

Advocates for low-income Pennsylvanians are sounding the alarm about a package of bills in Harrisburg that places serious roadblocks in front of anyone seeking assistance through food stamps, welfare or other social services.

Chelsea Long at Boulder Weekly: The Elephant in the classroom

In its recent election, CU students showed up in record numbers to elect a new set of representatives. And in a sweeping victory, one ticket took every seat it ran for.

29 April, 2011 – 9:09 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in interesting | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , |