A great article on inheritance wills & estates battles between Depression era generation & their kids, Baby Boomers. These baby boomers, depending on which social class they are in, are patiently, or rather very impatiently, waiting for some windfall, so they can wipe off their debts & finally be able to live the good life.
But as the article suggests, most baby boomers are in the social class in which they won't be able to receive much money, if at all, & hence, they won't ever achieve their dream life. All their waiting won't get them much.
All these inheritance wars are big money-makers for lawyers, of course. No family is perfect & all the family past grudges rise up to the surface when wills are on the line. Then, kids, especially the ones who feel left out, fight back & lawyers cash in.
To avoid all this problem in Islam, God laid out the whole inheritance plan for Muslims in Quran (Chapter 4). God didn't even leave it for Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) to show to Muslims, because, as we can see today, Muslims are divided on the life & teachings of Prophet Muhammad.
Islam regarded this inheritance issue so critically that God said in Quran that even if a Muslim is very pious & lives his/her whole life to the letter & spirit of Islam, if he/she makes the wrong will (e.g. favouring one child over another), his/her whole life's prayers & piety will come to nothing. That's why, Muslims are encouraged to make a will in their lifetimes & divide their properties / assets as per what the Quran entails.
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Surveys suggest nearly half of Baby Boomers are expecting some sort of inheritance, & that many have a grossly inflated idea of how much they’re about to receive. (On average, Canadians overestimate how much they’ll inherit by about 50%.)
Undeniably, there is money at hand: According to the BMO Wealth Institute, as much as $1 trillion in family wealth is in the process of being passed down from the so-called “Greatest Generation,” raised during the Depression & the Second World War, over the next couple of decades. Even when adjusted for inflation, that’s an unprecedented migration of assets, with seniors’ Boomer-aged children as presumptive beneficiaries.
But for many Boomers, the money can’t come soon enough. Half of homeowners in their 50s still have mortgage debt. One in two Canadians say they expect to retire before they’ve paid off their homes.
Figures compiled by credit monitor Equifax, meanwhile, suggest the average person aged 56-65 is carrying $27,000 in consumer debt, such as credit cards & car loans. They’re going to need cash to maintain their standard of living, say experts, & their desperation is starting to show. Court files are replete with challenges to wills involving claimants nearing retirement age, while the sheer nastiness of family battles is on the rise. “There is a degree of entitlement there,” says Megan Connolly, a Toronto wills & estates specialist. “It’s this attitude that mom’s or dad’s savings are communal family property, that what’s my mom’s is mine.”
There’s no guarantee, alas, that the inter-generational asset transfer will benefit those feeling the most pressure. Wealth is more concentrated within the top economic classes of Canada than it has been since the Depression, notes Robin Boadway, a retired Queen’s University economist who has studied wealth & inheritance, & inheritance will help to ensure it stays that way. “If you have high wealth inequality,” he says, “then automatically, you’re going to have those inequalities transferred to the next generation.”
All of which suggests that our anticipation for the trillion-dollar wealth transfer may be blinding us to unforeseen costs, from economic tensions between generations to ruptures within families. Will all this money solve as many problems as it creates?
Les Kotzer has stories, many stories, & one of his favourites involves a posh-looking couple in their late 50s who arrived at his law office north of Toronto. The woman’s fur coat & the man’s bespoke clothing led Kotzer to think he’d be dealing in big numbers. But he soon learned otherwise. “She was working as a substitute teacher, & they were renting a house,” he recalls. “I asked her husband what he did, & the woman says, ‘Harry’s not going to tell you this, but he’s a waiter.’ ” Kotzer asked what restaurant the man worked at. (“I’m thinking the tips must be amazing!”) Once again, the woman answered: “Oh, Harry’s not that kind of waiter. He’s waiting for his inheritance.”
To Kotzer, a wills & estates lawyer, the parable encapsulates a gulf in values between free-spending Boomers & their thrifty parents—people who, as he puts it, “saved up their yogurt containers.” The “waiters” have become a punchline he uses to break the social taboo against discussing wills & estates—a reticence he believes has never been more misplaced. Along with his partner, Barry Fish, Kotzer has written 3 books that recount the family battles he has witnessed ... & that counsel readers on how to avoid these clashes.
His latest book with Fish, "The Wills Lawyers," features numerous examples of greed & betrayal rooted in that tension between the Greatest Generation & their children, pitting sibling against sibling &, in some cases, parent against child. ...
Much as he thrives on the attention, Kotzer says the human fallout is all too real. He recounts in one of his books the tale of an elderly couple whose adult son moved to a remote mining town in northern Ontario & falsely claimed to be unemployed so his parents would keep sending cash. They finally uncovered their son’s lies when they paid him a surprise visit. It turned out he had a well-paying office job as a geologist at the local mine; they arrived to find he’d flown off to Puerto Rico for a 10-day cruise with his wife. “He obviously couldn’t wait for us to die,” the mother, who needed a walker to get around, told Kotzer. “He wanted his inheritance early, so he lied to us.”
Such cases illustrate the hazards of banking on a loved one’s estate, say experts: Family spats become more likely when a senior senses that his offspring are prematurely sizing up his assets. Deepening those tensions is the fact that people are living longer than ever, meaning the money relatives are counting on coming their way may instead be needed to support the person to whom it actually belongs. “When an elderly parent who has living expenses & health costs & so on is spending the money,” says Connolly, the Toronto inheritance lawyer, “the younger generation can start to see it almost as money from their own pockets.”
It all has the potential to turn very ugly, very fast. Connolly has seen instances of adult heirs pressuring their parents for advances on their inheritance, or outright control of their assets. Lawyers call it power-of-attorney abuse, but it’s not always driven by larcenous intent. “They start thinking, ‘Well, this money’s coming to me anyway, Mom is 90 & in a long-term care home, so why not start taking it now?’ ” explains Connolly. “A lot of times, it’s behaviour people feel they can justify.”
The growing phenomenon of second, third & non-traditional families has further complicated the picture. In 1996, B.C. passed a law allowing second spouses & half-siblings to contest wills on the basis that they’re not adequately provided for. The result has been a spike in fractious disputes in that province—many stemming from wills that weren’t updated after the dead person remarried or had more children.
It’s the sort of thing that goes on whenever large amounts of money are at stake &, viewed in aggregate, the sums awaiting Boomer-aged heirs look irresistible. Environics Analytics, a Toronto-based marketing consultancy, has calculated the average liquid assets of Canadians 65 & over at $440,561 per household—& that doesn’t include fixed assets, such as houses & cars. To Peter Miron, a senior research associate with the firm, that mountain of wealth symbolizes the difference in values between seniors & their Baby Boom kids. “The generation who lived through the Depression & the war were mindful of what they went through,” he says. “During the boom times of the 1950s, ’60s & ’70s, they had the opportunity to save, & they took advantage of it because they knew things would not always be this good.”
By comparison, the average Boomer household has $252,674 in liquid assets (cash, stocks, term deposits & the like), & considerably more debt. According to Equifax, average non-mortgage debt within the 56-65 age bracket has climbed more than 40% since early 2008, & is still rising. Nearly half of Boomers tell pollsters they’ve saved less than $100,000 for retirement, depending instead on the rising value of their homes. “If the real estate market goes soft, or if interest rates on debt go up dramatically,” warns Miron, “a lot of people are going to be in trouble.”
Piling blame on Boomers is easy, of course. And to suggest money hunger is something new requires one to ignore a couple of millennia of human history. Through nearly two decades of low interest rates & ballooning real estate prices, after all, Baby Boomers have had little incentive to save & every reason to mortgage up. At no point has their economic environment looked like that of their parents.
And the truth is that many won’t ever see the sort of windfall the averages suggest. Perhaps the most sobering figure produced by Environics Analytics is a breakdown of total liquid assets according to economic class, showing that the most affluent 17% of seniors in the country—people whose liquid savings average nearly $2 million per household—are sitting on an astounding third of the nation’s wealth. That’s more than 3 times the amount held by the remaining 83% of seniors combined .
In short, rich Boomers are about to get richer, thanks to bequests from their affluent parents. Those retiring in dire financial straits, meanwhile, will remain on the ropes, forced to live off private & public pensions.
The scale of concentration is great enough that there have been rumblings in favour of a wealth tax in Canada, inspired in part by French economist Thomas Piketty’s landmark research showing the inexorable rise in wealth inequality in market economies. Left-wing think tanks like the Broadbent Institute have called for an examination of the matter, while Boadway, the Queen’s economist, favours an inheritance tax imposed on those receiving the most money. “It would be based on the idea that high inequality of wealth is largely a result of luck,” he says. “There’s definitely an argument to be made for it.”
It won’t be an easy sell. In the 1950s, Ottawa turned over inheritance taxes to the provinces, who raced each other to phase them out. By 1980, they were gone, & today they remain deeply unpopular. While the average inheritance of $100,000 might pale next to the rich bequests of the affluent 17%, it’s still a lot of money to most Canadians, after all. To them, even discussing an inheritance tax on the fattest estates fuels concern that the government is reaching into their pockets.
Those living comfortably, it goes without saying, are no less possessive toward what they see as family money.
... Old grudges die hard &, until the will has been read & closed, the estate of an aging parent is of no more use than Monopoly money. Waiting, it turns out, doesn’t always pay.
But as the article suggests, most baby boomers are in the social class in which they won't be able to receive much money, if at all, & hence, they won't ever achieve their dream life. All their waiting won't get them much.
All these inheritance wars are big money-makers for lawyers, of course. No family is perfect & all the family past grudges rise up to the surface when wills are on the line. Then, kids, especially the ones who feel left out, fight back & lawyers cash in.
To avoid all this problem in Islam, God laid out the whole inheritance plan for Muslims in Quran (Chapter 4). God didn't even leave it for Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) to show to Muslims, because, as we can see today, Muslims are divided on the life & teachings of Prophet Muhammad.
Islam regarded this inheritance issue so critically that God said in Quran that even if a Muslim is very pious & lives his/her whole life to the letter & spirit of Islam, if he/she makes the wrong will (e.g. favouring one child over another), his/her whole life's prayers & piety will come to nothing. That's why, Muslims are encouraged to make a will in their lifetimes & divide their properties / assets as per what the Quran entails.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Surveys suggest nearly half of Baby Boomers are expecting some sort of inheritance, & that many have a grossly inflated idea of how much they’re about to receive. (On average, Canadians overestimate how much they’ll inherit by about 50%.)
Undeniably, there is money at hand: According to the BMO Wealth Institute, as much as $1 trillion in family wealth is in the process of being passed down from the so-called “Greatest Generation,” raised during the Depression & the Second World War, over the next couple of decades. Even when adjusted for inflation, that’s an unprecedented migration of assets, with seniors’ Boomer-aged children as presumptive beneficiaries.
But for many Boomers, the money can’t come soon enough. Half of homeowners in their 50s still have mortgage debt. One in two Canadians say they expect to retire before they’ve paid off their homes.
Figures compiled by credit monitor Equifax, meanwhile, suggest the average person aged 56-65 is carrying $27,000 in consumer debt, such as credit cards & car loans. They’re going to need cash to maintain their standard of living, say experts, & their desperation is starting to show. Court files are replete with challenges to wills involving claimants nearing retirement age, while the sheer nastiness of family battles is on the rise. “There is a degree of entitlement there,” says Megan Connolly, a Toronto wills & estates specialist. “It’s this attitude that mom’s or dad’s savings are communal family property, that what’s my mom’s is mine.”
There’s no guarantee, alas, that the inter-generational asset transfer will benefit those feeling the most pressure. Wealth is more concentrated within the top economic classes of Canada than it has been since the Depression, notes Robin Boadway, a retired Queen’s University economist who has studied wealth & inheritance, & inheritance will help to ensure it stays that way. “If you have high wealth inequality,” he says, “then automatically, you’re going to have those inequalities transferred to the next generation.”
All of which suggests that our anticipation for the trillion-dollar wealth transfer may be blinding us to unforeseen costs, from economic tensions between generations to ruptures within families. Will all this money solve as many problems as it creates?
Les Kotzer has stories, many stories, & one of his favourites involves a posh-looking couple in their late 50s who arrived at his law office north of Toronto. The woman’s fur coat & the man’s bespoke clothing led Kotzer to think he’d be dealing in big numbers. But he soon learned otherwise. “She was working as a substitute teacher, & they were renting a house,” he recalls. “I asked her husband what he did, & the woman says, ‘Harry’s not going to tell you this, but he’s a waiter.’ ” Kotzer asked what restaurant the man worked at. (“I’m thinking the tips must be amazing!”) Once again, the woman answered: “Oh, Harry’s not that kind of waiter. He’s waiting for his inheritance.”
To Kotzer, a wills & estates lawyer, the parable encapsulates a gulf in values between free-spending Boomers & their thrifty parents—people who, as he puts it, “saved up their yogurt containers.” The “waiters” have become a punchline he uses to break the social taboo against discussing wills & estates—a reticence he believes has never been more misplaced. Along with his partner, Barry Fish, Kotzer has written 3 books that recount the family battles he has witnessed ... & that counsel readers on how to avoid these clashes.
His latest book with Fish, "The Wills Lawyers," features numerous examples of greed & betrayal rooted in that tension between the Greatest Generation & their children, pitting sibling against sibling &, in some cases, parent against child. ...
Much as he thrives on the attention, Kotzer says the human fallout is all too real. He recounts in one of his books the tale of an elderly couple whose adult son moved to a remote mining town in northern Ontario & falsely claimed to be unemployed so his parents would keep sending cash. They finally uncovered their son’s lies when they paid him a surprise visit. It turned out he had a well-paying office job as a geologist at the local mine; they arrived to find he’d flown off to Puerto Rico for a 10-day cruise with his wife. “He obviously couldn’t wait for us to die,” the mother, who needed a walker to get around, told Kotzer. “He wanted his inheritance early, so he lied to us.”
Such cases illustrate the hazards of banking on a loved one’s estate, say experts: Family spats become more likely when a senior senses that his offspring are prematurely sizing up his assets. Deepening those tensions is the fact that people are living longer than ever, meaning the money relatives are counting on coming their way may instead be needed to support the person to whom it actually belongs. “When an elderly parent who has living expenses & health costs & so on is spending the money,” says Connolly, the Toronto inheritance lawyer, “the younger generation can start to see it almost as money from their own pockets.”
It all has the potential to turn very ugly, very fast. Connolly has seen instances of adult heirs pressuring their parents for advances on their inheritance, or outright control of their assets. Lawyers call it power-of-attorney abuse, but it’s not always driven by larcenous intent. “They start thinking, ‘Well, this money’s coming to me anyway, Mom is 90 & in a long-term care home, so why not start taking it now?’ ” explains Connolly. “A lot of times, it’s behaviour people feel they can justify.”
The growing phenomenon of second, third & non-traditional families has further complicated the picture. In 1996, B.C. passed a law allowing second spouses & half-siblings to contest wills on the basis that they’re not adequately provided for. The result has been a spike in fractious disputes in that province—many stemming from wills that weren’t updated after the dead person remarried or had more children.
It’s the sort of thing that goes on whenever large amounts of money are at stake &, viewed in aggregate, the sums awaiting Boomer-aged heirs look irresistible. Environics Analytics, a Toronto-based marketing consultancy, has calculated the average liquid assets of Canadians 65 & over at $440,561 per household—& that doesn’t include fixed assets, such as houses & cars. To Peter Miron, a senior research associate with the firm, that mountain of wealth symbolizes the difference in values between seniors & their Baby Boom kids. “The generation who lived through the Depression & the war were mindful of what they went through,” he says. “During the boom times of the 1950s, ’60s & ’70s, they had the opportunity to save, & they took advantage of it because they knew things would not always be this good.”
By comparison, the average Boomer household has $252,674 in liquid assets (cash, stocks, term deposits & the like), & considerably more debt. According to Equifax, average non-mortgage debt within the 56-65 age bracket has climbed more than 40% since early 2008, & is still rising. Nearly half of Boomers tell pollsters they’ve saved less than $100,000 for retirement, depending instead on the rising value of their homes. “If the real estate market goes soft, or if interest rates on debt go up dramatically,” warns Miron, “a lot of people are going to be in trouble.”
Piling blame on Boomers is easy, of course. And to suggest money hunger is something new requires one to ignore a couple of millennia of human history. Through nearly two decades of low interest rates & ballooning real estate prices, after all, Baby Boomers have had little incentive to save & every reason to mortgage up. At no point has their economic environment looked like that of their parents.
And the truth is that many won’t ever see the sort of windfall the averages suggest. Perhaps the most sobering figure produced by Environics Analytics is a breakdown of total liquid assets according to economic class, showing that the most affluent 17% of seniors in the country—people whose liquid savings average nearly $2 million per household—are sitting on an astounding third of the nation’s wealth. That’s more than 3 times the amount held by the remaining 83% of seniors combined .
In short, rich Boomers are about to get richer, thanks to bequests from their affluent parents. Those retiring in dire financial straits, meanwhile, will remain on the ropes, forced to live off private & public pensions.
The scale of concentration is great enough that there have been rumblings in favour of a wealth tax in Canada, inspired in part by French economist Thomas Piketty’s landmark research showing the inexorable rise in wealth inequality in market economies. Left-wing think tanks like the Broadbent Institute have called for an examination of the matter, while Boadway, the Queen’s economist, favours an inheritance tax imposed on those receiving the most money. “It would be based on the idea that high inequality of wealth is largely a result of luck,” he says. “There’s definitely an argument to be made for it.”
It won’t be an easy sell. In the 1950s, Ottawa turned over inheritance taxes to the provinces, who raced each other to phase them out. By 1980, they were gone, & today they remain deeply unpopular. While the average inheritance of $100,000 might pale next to the rich bequests of the affluent 17%, it’s still a lot of money to most Canadians, after all. To them, even discussing an inheritance tax on the fattest estates fuels concern that the government is reaching into their pockets.
Those living comfortably, it goes without saying, are no less possessive toward what they see as family money.
... Old grudges die hard &, until the will has been read & closed, the estate of an aging parent is of no more use than Monopoly money. Waiting, it turns out, doesn’t always pay.
