<p>YEAH!!! JMY626!!! Finally you are outf rom under that house-selling nightmare!</p>
<p>Thanks, mathmom and anxiousmom. You guys are great. The hurdles have been cleared but the attorney is out of town, so the final paperwork and release of funds hasn’t happened yet. I will not feel total relief until all that happens.</p>
<p>Congrats jym! With your 100% success rate I’d be willing to let you handle the sale of my Mom’s house. It’s got a few issues …</p>
<p>Sure, NewHope. Happy to help. It was such a piece of cake. Lets talk about fees…</p>
<p>lol jym626! Crossing my fingers that this nightmare will be over soon. I am not looking forward to handling this when my time comes.</p>
<p>Yay for Jym626! Can’t wait to read that the attorney is back and all the details are DONE!</p>
<p>From your typing fingers to g-d’s ears!!</p>
<p>Joining in here. MIL passed, and her home in LA, owned through a trust, is now ours to deal with. I spent two full weeks clearing out most of the stuff (the house would not have been featured on Hoarders, but was still cluttered with 51 years of belongings.) We kept MIL’s aides on for a couple of weeks to help with sorting, dispersing, packing and cleaning, so now the house is sparkling clean and with only a modest amount of furniture. We don’t live in the area, but her long-time housekeeper is going to keep coming so that the house stays fresh. </p>
<p>In what is good news for the moment – her church is interested in buying the home (since it is down the block from the church) and using it as a combined parsonage/assisted living (board & care?) home for elderly church members. (It has a full MIL suite, and one of the pastors has been the live-in supervisor at another similar home. The pastors have been in and out of the house for years visiting MIL as she became housebound, but the vestry committee is coming through in a few days to take a more detailed look. We’ll see. Meanwhile, other things are on hold until we see if the church makes an acceptable offer, since their needs would drive very different changes than would be sought by a “typical” buyer. (For example, there are full handicapped grab bars near most of the toilets and in all the showers; not sure that most buyers would want to see those.)</p>
<p>JYM (or anyone else) – were there any special issues related to selling a property where the house was in a trust but the associated personal property (fridge, washer, dryer,…) was owned by someone else by virtue of being passed through the will? (H got the “stuff” according to the will.)</p>
<p>In the state my dad’s house was located the appliances remained with the house. We tried to exclude the chandeliers (which probaly werent worth much) and the buyers wanted some ridiculous allowance for lighting. So we just left the fixtures.</p>
<p>The contents were left to me in the trust but I let my )$(W<em>$)^&W$^ brother and his )(!$$#</em>W$*^)% wife take what they wanted from the house when they were there, which included lots of valuables and even a chair someone was sitting on at the time :eek: Most of the stuff was old and thrown away or donated. We hired someone to do that part of it (clean the house, sell/donate stuff, etc) it cost more to hire them than the items were worth, but it was well worth it. </p>
<p>Check with your attorney, but in our case the will was not an issue as there was a trust and the distribution of the contents were spelled out there. I gave a relative the dining room table/chairs and that turned out to be more of a hassle than it needed to be, but mostly because of her and not any legal issues.</p>
<p>When the funds from the house sale are finally sent to the trust attorney from the real estate attorney we can move towards closing out the estate. That will be another whole can of worms. There is very little there, but I suspect my brother will not make this easy. Stay tuned.</p>
<p>BTW, our house had 2 bannisters on the staircase as my late mom had parkinsons, but this was not a big deterrent. The fact that you have handicapped accesibility/grab bars isnt a bad thing, IMO. And you are fortunate that you have interest from the church. It is better, IMO, to offer them a good deal and be done with it than to have to put it on the market and go through what I did.</p>
<p>
Does your husband want any of this stuff? Especially if it is old.</p>
<p>In my state the seller usually takes their appliances with them unless negotiated as part of the sale. If the church wants them you could</p>
<ul>
<li><p>abandon them and just let the buyer have them</p></li>
<li><p>set up a separate agreement for the church to buy them directly from your husband (maybe offset by a lower purchase price)</p></li>
<li><p>have your husband sell them to the trust, then the trust owns everything.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>Just throwing out some ideas…</p>
<p>Yup. We’d be very happy with selling it to them, but there has to be a reasonable offer on the table. A quick and painless sale is worth a lot to us, particularly given the distances involved. </p>
<p>And there are a lot of times when I am glad H is an only child – this is definitely one of them. As the accountant said, “Congratulations, you’re King for a Day – personal representative, sole beneficiary, and sole trustee.” Not that there will be a lot left, unfortunately, but at least there aren’t other siblings to have to deal with. (And I’m guessing that in a down real estate market, trying to gain agreement on a listing price with some siblings who want X, and some who want to wait until they could get Y, and some who want to put in improvements so that it would be worth Z could be very interesting.)</p>
<p>Hi NotRichEnough – we already shipped everything we want back to our house (where it is currently filling my family room) – from there we’ll disperse quite a bit of it to cousins. </p>
<p>Unfortunately, quite a lot of the nicer furniture was just not at all a fit for our house. </p>
<p>I’m hoping that the church would be happy to have the appliances if they buy the house – maybe it would make sense just to do that as a donation. The fridge is a new, expensive one, but the other appliances aren’t new.</p>
<p>We had literally just bought a new washer for my dads house a few weeks before he died. It was by no means a fancy one, but it was brand spankin’ new.</p>
<p>Fortunately or unfortunately, depending opn how you look at it, I was sole trustee of the (not very big) trust. Due to family dynamics I won’t waste your time with, my parents put something in the trust called the “Sinatra clause” (because their atty said Sinatra did this) that if he (my brother) contests anything he gets $1. So I haven’t heard a peep out of my brother in over a year. I wouldn’t be surprised, though, if he wsnts some sort of formal accounting, just to waste my time some more…</p>
<p>In CT an accounting is required for Trusts … an accounting that must balance to the penny and withstand an audit. But I’ll take care of the accounting jym … you just focus on selling my Mom’s house. (Can I pay your fees with old clothes and used furniture?)</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Wow. Just wow.</p>
<p>Yes, VH, I was quite shocked when they told me about that.</p>
<p>“Sinatra clause”</p>
<p>What was that again, jym? Does it mean that your brother gets no inheritance or he cannot interfere your authority as a trustee? If so, how can he demand a full accounting?</p>
<p>Contesting the Will and demanding an accounting are two different things. Let’s say Dad leaves a $500,000 estate divided $200,000 each to two offspring and $100,000 to a third offspring. The third offspring may elect to contest the Will because shares are not equal. On the other hand, if the third offspring does not contest the Will but receives just $50,000 then s/he would be well advised to demand an audit … because s/he didn’t get what the Will stated s/he would.</p>
<p>A foundation I serve on gets several bequests a year, and in every case I can think of we get an accounting of how funds were disbursed from the estate as a whole. With trusts we only get a check and a letter from the trustee, but disbursements via a will come with a copy of the will and a full accounting.</p>
<p>I will do what the trust attorney advises me to do. As I said, the funds are small as most was spent during dad’s lifetime. He almost outlived his money. </p>
<p>We had to refi the house just to let dad stay in it as long as he wanted, as was his wish. It was his money and he was entitled to spend it any way he wanted. And he wanted to live in the house, which required attendant care and case management, which isnt cheap, so its really a non-issue about the small remaining funds. Lets get back to talking about housing.</p>