Divemedic

This is what happens when people from the big city move out to the country. Do you hear how scared this woman is?

This lady finds mountain lion on her patio
pic.twitter.com/Calo6qeJm5

— Science girl (@gunsnrosesgirl3) December 23, 2023

I thought the process was obvious, but I guess I didn’t explain it well. Let me try from the other side.

Let’s say that your name is John. Your wife Christine just died and left no will. Being that she was a widow, you were her second husband, and she had bank accounts in solely her name from a previous marriage, (including the retirement funds from her previous late husband).

The bank just told you that all you need is identification, a death certificate, and your marriage license, and they will cut you a check from the retirement account that Christine once shared with her husband.

The problem is that Christine’s adult children produce a will from before you married her, and this will says that THEY are the ones who will receive her remaining property. In this case, Florida law says that the surviving spouse gets 1/3 of Christine’s estate before the will is taken into account. Since it is assumed that the surviving spouse gets everything, the surviving children will have to hire a lawyer and go to court in order to enforce this will. In order to fight it, you will have to hire a lawyer as well. By the time all is said and done, the lawyers in the case will cost between 1/3 and 1/2 of the total inheritance. Everyone except the lawyers loses.

The children come to you with an offer: If you agree to take half of the estate, that is still more than what you would get after the court battle. Win for you.

That’s the idea, anyhow.

So we were helping Mom’s husband clean out the mess in his house. When we were in the detached garage, we found a safe inside of it. Inside of it was $4,000 in cash, the phone number to her stockbroker, and a will that was written in 2006. That will dictated that my mother’s assets be split between the three of Mom and Dad’s children. The three of us have wills that were written earlier, but they were all from before Dad passed away.

She married her husband in 2021. Since getting married, my mother and her husband have maintained separate bank accounts at the insistence of the husband’s daughter, who always accused my mother of being a gold digger, but was also collecting $4,000 a month in support payments from her father. Those payments are scheduled to continue until the daughter turns 25 years old. (She is 23 now)

According to my brother’s estate attorney, the will from 2006 is the controlling one, but since they were married after that will was written, her husband (we will call him John) is entitled to a third of the assets, then the remainder will be split according to the will. John, however has dementia and isn’t in good health. That means that John’s daughter Susan will get whatever money he gets from my Mother’s estate as soon as he passes.

This is important, because the stockbroker tells us that he closed Mom’s account back in June, at her request. The money was sent to a bank by wire transfer, and that is where the trail grows cold. The balance that was transferred was over $150,000. That amount represents the remainder of my father’s retirement savings.

This bothers us, because Susan was absolutely ugly to my Mother. She opposed the wedding, and when she and her father went out to dinner, Susan would never let my mother go with them. Letting this woman that none of us know inherit the money that my Mom and Dad spend a lifetime putting away isn’t sitting right with us. We have discussed it- all three of us siblings have grandchildren, and we want to fight for that money and use it to set up a trust for Mom and Dad’s great-grandchildren, our grandkids.

This would possibly entail a protracted and expensive legal battle. Lawyers would likely eat up half of the money that is there. So instead, we are going to request that the state place Mom’s estate in probate, and then offer to settle it by giving John half of the estate, with the remaining half being used to setup a trust for the benefit of Mom’s great-grandchildren.

If Mom intended things to go any other way, then why didn’t she write a new will? If the 2006 will was no longer her wishes because of her wedding, then why didn’t she rewrite it? Why keep it in the safe?

Still a mess, and getting messier every day.

It seems that every time I decide to stop posting about the things that cops do because I don’t want to be a blog that does nothing but bitch about cops, they go and screw up again. This time, a cop in his police cruiser was caught on camera blowing a red light, then swerved across two lanes of traffic before plowing into a bar. The cop claims that he swerved to avoid a dog, then changed the story to a parked car, then changed the story again to say he was changing the channel on his police radio.

The cops then arrested one of the owners of the bar, claiming that he committed Felony Battery on a LEO before reducing the charges to misdemeanor battery. What did he do? Well, it turns out that there is video of the bar owner arriving on the scene and an officer approaching the bar owner and asking him if he’s the owner, to which the man responds affirmatively.

The officer asked to see the bar owner’s ID, prompting the owner to say, “Why should I show my ID? I didn’t do anything wrong.”

He said it loudly, because he’s not happy, so an officer responds with, “You don’t get to yell at me. You’re under arrest for disturbing the peace,” and then, when bystanders repeatedly asked the officer why the man was he arrested, he said, ‘Nobody gets to yell at me.'”

So let’s see how the police protect one of their bad apples.