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