Some reasons why parents disinherit one or more of their children from their estate plan

Attorney Tom Olsen: When we have clients that come to us and say, "Tom, we've got three kids. We want to leave everything to two. We're not going to leave anything to Bill." We always make notes in our database about why the clients are not going to leave anything to Bill. We could give a variety of reasons. One bounces back and forth with reasons that you hear, reasons I hear. Let's start with an easy one.

Let's just say, "Hey, Bill is a medical doctor, he's making tons of money, he doesn't need any money. Bill's in agreement that we should leave everything to our other two kids." "Hey, everybody's good with that." What's another reason that you come up with sometimes?

Attorney Chris Merrill: Another reason is that they will say that they have given that child their share during their lifetime.

Tom: That's a good one. Maybe they gave the child $200,000 to buy a new home and that's they got their share during their lifetime.

Chris: Yes.

Tom: Tell you another one is sometimes "Yes, we've got a child, Mary, and we're estranged. We haven't heard from her for many, many years," or "She never calls, she never comes by to visit." Another one would be that, "Hey, we have a child, Chuck, and we loaned Chuck money with the understanding he'd pay us back, and he never paid us back." I had one where they had loaned money or given money to a child to buy a home with the understanding that when the child sold the home, they would split the profits. Guess what? The child sold the home and kept all the profits.

Those are all good reasons, but the reason we're going there is that we make notes about that in our database. Why? Because when mom and dad pass away, we're going to get a letter, let's say, from Bill's lawyers. It goes something like this, "You wrote the will for Bill's parents and their wills, they intentionally omitted Bill, did not leave him anything," and it's always with quite an indignant attitude.

"There's no reason on earth the parents should have omitted Bill from their will. We're going to think about filing a suit trying to overturn this will and get Bill back in the will." What happens then is that we go to our database and we find these different reasons why mom and dad didn't leave anything to Bill, and we send those reasons back to the lawyer, and usually, you know what, that makes it all go away.

Chris: Exactly.

Tom: Two important things about that. One is that we put those reasons in our database so that we can share them if and when Bill comes to challenge the will. Number two, when we do the will for the parents we put language in there. "We specifically omit Bill from our estate planning for our own reasons." It can be very general and vague about that.

That's not required by law but it's good practice because otherwise, if we didn't do that and mom and dad passed away, Bill might file a lawsuit and say, "Hey, you know what, my parents they were incompetent when they signed their will. They just forgot they had a son named Bill. That's why I'm not in there." By putting that intentionally, omit language, we can close the door to that argument.

Chris: That's a common situation--

Tom: Go ahead.

Chris: I was going to say that's a common situation where people will ask us if they want to leave a dollar. Then, that's where we tell them, "No, it's not about leaving a dollar. It's about doing it the way you described," which is the omission.