After you pass away, your adult children could get involved in an estate dispute. This is something that many parents worry about because they don’t want siblings to become estranged or to have a long-term falling out over their inheritance.
How do you prevent this from happening? There’s nothing that guarantees your children will not get into a dispute, but there are some things you can do to lower the odds that it will happen.
Give gifts in advance
One option is to give gifts to your adult children even before you pass away. Giving away money during your lifetime can help to reduce the value of your estate, and it means that you’re still around to navigate any potential disputes or complaints from other siblings.
Explain your decisions
Another thing that can help is to either draft a document explaining your wishes and why you made the choices you did, or to sit down and have this conversation with your adult children while you are still alive. Disputes often focus on what a parent would have wanted – and children just don’t agree. By deliberately telling them this in advance, you stave off some of these disagreements.
Avoiding overlapping roles
Finally, you may pick some of your adult children for various roles with your estate plan. It’s wise to ensure that these don’t overlap in a way that could cause conflict. For example, if you’re setting up a trust, you probably do not want to make one sibling the trustee and another sibling the beneficiary.
The best thing to do to avoid estate disputes is simply to plan in advance. Be sure you know what legal steps to take.
