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Jende Was Confused About Inheritance In Seattle

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Dandy Don

Senior Member
Jende, your post was most interesting and calls for serious follow up by you.

You need to check at the county courthouse to make sure that no one has filed to open up this estate for probate.

If you have not received a copy of the will already, you need to request one.

Your aunt has seriously mishandled the estate assets. You need to get a Colorado probate attorney (if in fact Colorado is where the decedent died) to open up probate and ask judge to force auntie to produce the will for probate. If probate had been done properly, the names on the deed/title would have been officially changed and when the sale took place you would have been issued a check instead of having the sneaky aunt take all of the monies and incorrectly put them in CD's!! There may be other assets in the will that still need to be probated.

You have no business paying capital gains taxes when this estate can well afford to pay it out of the $3.1 million in the sale--executor is responsible for preparing these tax returns (state and federal) and getting that taken care of, thus resulting in a significant savings benefit for you since you don't have to pay that--too bad you were mislead about that aspect. You may want to consult your own tax professional (CPA or tax accountant who has experience with estates) to have a sample, dummy return done for the estate to see how much total income tax would be due and how much capital gains tax is and whether it would be to your advantage to have the CD's cashed out or not, and whether inheritance tax applies or not.

The most troubling thing is that if the CD's had been issued in BOTH names, the aunt should not have been able to cash one of them in (how much money was THAT??)--checks should have been issued to both of you. I fear that if you don't contact the bank to find out if you are listed as an account co-owner or as beneficiary, then it is possible she might steal the rest of this money from you. She is probably ignorant or unaware of how estate matters are supposed to be handled or she may have mistakenly thought that probate costs would be exorbitant, so your attorney needs to review what she has done and also advise her to get probate done right and to consult tax adviser and legal help if she needs it.

You were very smart to post to this message board since you knew something was wrong with the way this estate was being handled. Best of luck to you in getting this resolved!!

DANDY DON IN OKLAHOMA (tiekh@yahoo.com)
 
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