I’m NOT the parent in question. Just a FYI.
And by mental capacity, I mean like not just IQ, but also other mental conditions like depression, ADD/ADHD, etc…
Like the child(ren) has not done anything wrong like crime or misbehave, but simply the parent thinking that giving an inhertance to (in their view) a “mentally disabled” child is a waste and “would just end up in the hands of government”. And they justify it since they think that “the kid can just get disability income anyways”. (Location is USA, for reference)
I personally think this is just very ableist… what do you think? Is it okay for parents to do that?
Here’s a tip: if you have multiple children, split everything evenly no matter what. It doesn’t matter how good your reasoning is. It doesn’t matter if one kid is an addict, it doesn’t matter if one kid needs the money more. It doesn’t matter if one cares for you in your old age and the other disappeared.
No matter what.
You are inviting nothing but misery into ALL of your children’s lives by dividing it unevenly. No matter how reasonable it is to do something else, they will always tend to think that dividing the inheritance unevenly means that you loved them unequally.
I think it’s also worth having frank discussions with your kids about their inheritance and encouraging them to work things out themselves ahead of time.
My family has maybe a bit unusual but I think very healthy relationship with death. It comes for us all eventually, no sense dancing around it.
There’s no complicated inheritance situations in my family, if you have kids everything gets divided up evenly among them. If they don’t have kids it gets divided up evenly among their nieces/nephews.
So for example my parents estate gets split between my sister and myself, my uncle who doesn’t have kids gets split between us and my cousin, my cousin gets his parents’ all to himself.
We’ve already got things divvied up amongst ourselves pretty well. As long as my sister signs over her claim to our parent’s house, I’ll sign over my third of our uncle’s house to her, and she’s happy to buy our cousin out of his third or trade him for her current house (which would also have the benefit of getting all 3 of us in the same town, cousin has some disabilities and it would be nice to have us all nearby in case of emergencies, or the payout from my sister or money from sale of her house plus his own inheritance from his parents would set him up pretty well)
We also occasionally call dibs on some other desirable belongings, like my uncles skillsaw
this. even if it’s a dollar.
that one kid will be wondering why the $1 for the rest of their lives but have no way of finding out why. that stuff can start as nothing but fester quickly. I’ve had this happen to my family.
I would think a disabled person would need more money to survive in this world than someone not disabled.
If I were the parent, knowing exactly how little disability actually covers, as both my father and my wife are/were on it. I would help that kid more, and hope I raised my other kids to appreciate that they just needed more help.
That’s absolutely ableist.
No one is entitled to anyone’s inheritance. The ethics of the situation really depend on the details. Did one child look after the parents in their old age? Doe one child have more needs? Was there a promise to distribute everything evenly?
If the only reason for exclusion is because one child has depression or anxiety and isn’t the smartest, then that sounds pretty ableist and shitty. If the person really can’t manage the money, why not set up a trust designed to help them out without just handing over lump sums of cash? The one case where exclusion makes sense is if they require long term in patient care since at least in the US, all your money is eaten up by the medical bills before you default to Medicare (unless you have a stupid amount of money and can pay out of pocket for premium care forever)
If we’re not talking actual cognitive disability, like needing to live with some form of caretaker. Then that’s kinda fucked up.
I didn’t for a second read that and think you were the parent.
My brother is very smart, but he has other disabilities that nobody can see. My mom has already planned on willing his house to me so he can continue to live there.
On paper it may not look fair, but the alternative would lead to him being homeless, so it would be unethical to do otherwise.
Couldn’t the alternative be let the house to him? I don’t see how you getting the house guarantees that he’s not getting homeless.
To qualify for some benefits you can’t have any assets. The state forces you to sell your assets and pay for care before they will chip in.
Hello boring dystopia
This isn’t what OP is talking about, however.
OP’s parents are assholes.
No, he doesn’t have the capacity to take care of the basics to keep it. Playing the utilities, taxes, maintaining the property, etc.
You can still help him do those things even if the house is his… Like, if he doesn’t have the house in his name, you can kick him out if you are a dick and there is nothing protecting him. If the house is his, you cannot do that, “best” you could do is stop helping out with the bills and such.
A family in that sort of situation has considered many options. Willing the house to the brother is the easiest, the poster and their mother have reasons for opting against it. They are likely good reasons; in the broader sense, willing property to someone who cannot care for it can in many scenarios be a bad idea.
It’s dangerous to assume the brother would be safe from predation if he owned his home; the poster could do a lot worse than just not paying the bills. This person apparently lacks the ability to pay taxes and ensure proper maintenance. Even just to help with that, the poster will need access to their brother’s banking and tax info. If the brother is compliant it would not be difficult for someone to take advantage of that situation.
Alternately, using their legal ownership of the home the brother could potentially shut the poster out and might actively sabotage efforts to maintain and pay for the home. In that case the property could suffer substantial damage, become dangerous/uninhabitable, or even be lost despite the poster’s efforts. Many people have destructive tendencies.
The more certain way to protect the house for the brother would be to place it in a trust, but that’s not a panacea. Setting up an ironclad trust to prevent selling the house is great until the brother can’t get up the stairs, or the whole family decides to move to Canada, or the brother goes into assisted living, or the property value skyrockets. A trust will also have tax implications and potential costs that need to be considered.
I assume and hope the mother has been advised by a decent estate lawyer on their options. There are scenarios where willing a house to a sibling is the best course of action. I wish the poster luck and hope they’ll act in the interest of their brother for their entire lives.
There are some circumstances where it makes sense. If you have a disability in the US, you cannot have money or you’ll lose your benefits
There are ways around this. Special needs trusts are very good tools. Not perfect but a good starting point for protecting a disabled adult while also providing for them.
The inheritance can be put into a special needs trust, to be used for the benefit of the child.
There’s no one size fits all answer here, it’s going to depend on how much money, how severe the childs disabilities are and what their care needs are, and what other sort of inheritance might be on the table ( for example one child gets the money and another child gets the house)
If the child is able to live on their own, then yeah, it’s a dick move and the parents are just playing favorites and being ableist.
If they have significant care needs- nursing home, psychiatric treatment, home health aides, visiting nurses, etc. then there might be some logical arguments to be made. If they’re already qualifying for some sort of government assistance then a large windfall of cash could potentially disrupt those benefits since they now have too much money to qualify.
That can be a real headache to navigate, they may need to arrange all new care for themselves, maybe switch doctors, find new housing, etc. which may be a lot for them to manage depending on the extent of their disabilities, and unless that inheritance is incredibly large it will probably run out at some point and leave them in a position where they need to navigate the system to get back on those government benefits, which is often no small feat.
So there could potentially be situations where it’s better for them to not leave them money and cause significant disruptions to their care and living arrangements.
This is all totally hypothetical without knowing the specifics of the situation. There’s a million different things to consider here and everyone’s situation is unique, and at best we’re getting one side of this story and don’t really know what the parents thoughts and reasoning are since we haven’t heard in directly from them (and it could very well be that their reason is just as shitty as it appears on the surface, I won’t discount that possibility)
You set up a trust (in the US they have a specific trust structure for disabled adults) and shield the beneficiary from the consequences of appearing to receive a disqualifying windfall.
This is true, and I did think about mentioning that but decided to keep it brief because once I start talking about trusts I’d find myself out of my depth pretty quickly and probably open up a rabbit hole of other financial strategies I’m not prepared or qualified to go down (and also to keep my comment at a more readable length)
But since we opened that can of worms (and like I said, this is getting out of my depth, so there’s a very real possibility that some or all of what I have to say after this is wrong, so take it for what it’s worth)
We also don’t know how much money we’re talking about here. The line between qualifying for benefits and not can be razor thin sometimes, and while we might assume that we’re talking about 10s or 100s of thousands of dollars or even more where a trust would absolutely make sense, we might actually only be talking about a couple thousand bucks, maybe not even enough to afford a couple months of rent depending on where you are, but potentially enough to fuck up someone’s benefits depending on where some government bean counters drew the line. It might be difficult or impossible to find a financial institution willing to act as a trustee for such a small amount, and there may not be any individual they trust to fill that role, and once the lawyers and such are paid there may not even be much left over.
There’s also the possibility that the parents are counting on the sibling(s) to sort of act as trustees without putting it in writing. We don’t know what their relationships and personalities are like, or what conversations they’ve had with their parents that maybe OP isn’t privy to. There could be an understanding there that they’re getting everything so that they can continue to provide for their disabled sibling after the parents are gone, and OP hasn’t been made aware of that (some people are really uncomfortable talking about this kind of stuff and avoid it even though they really should) or misunderstood what the intention is. That of course depends on the siblings being trustworthy and generally having their shit together well enough, which isn’t a given of course and their situation could change drastically.
There’s also the possibility that a trust is exactly what’s happening and OP either misunderstood it or just plain doesn’t like it. A lot of people out there are pretty clueless about financial matters. If the siblings were named as the trustee (it’s often not a good idea to have the trustee be a close relative, but that’s neither here nor there) I could see some people viewing the situation as “they left all the money to my siblings” because they’re not getting a big one time payout and the money has to go through their siblings in some fashion.
Again, I’m talking all in hypotheticals, there are countless “ifs,” “ands” and “buts” here, we don’t know the specifics of OPs situation so we can only speculate.
Whatever the issue is, it clearly manifested long before the topic of inheritance came up
It’s not ethical or unethical—but your framing makes it inherently from POV of some assholes, so it kinda renders the whole hypothetical moot.
People can allocate their assets as they please. Every situation is unique. In your situation, it sounds like the parents were narcissistic assholes with a disabled child.
I don’t think that is OK and the parents I’ve known in situations like that would never have thought of it.
Yes it’s ethical.
Family business : you want the steward to keep it going, maintain reputations, and support the family.
Large sums of money: look at lottery winners, many, many of them have really bad lives because they are not ready for the responsibility of managing it. If the child isn’t ready for it…
There are options for children who arnt ready to inherit. Trusts, disbursements over time, annuities
