Retirement Planning - Lessons Learned

[MossRoad]

We have a home equity loan. It's considered a mortgage. We use that available money to make large purchases, pay college tuition, etc... rather than depleting cash. We pay it off quickly, though.

By having that mortgage, it qualifies us for a homestead exemption, which cuts our property taxes almost in half. We save about $600 per year in property taxes. Most years, we pay about $300 in interest on that mortgage. So most years, by having a mortgage, it saves us about $300. Woo hoo! It's the only thing we've ever done where we feel we've come out ahead and beat the system. :laughing:

 

[MossRoad]

...

Bought a place with about 5,000 sq ft of sheds with good concrete floors, just about lined the interior walls with floor to ceiling pallet racking. ...

A couple blocks over from us, there was a double wide manufactured house on a crawl space. It appeared abandoned. Pretty run down and unkempt yard. One day, it was GONE! Only the crawl space was left. Then, about a month later, a different double wide appeared. While it was new, it was ugly. Only one window on the front next to the door. It had exterior lights on every corner. Weird, weird, weird. But, it was clean and kept up and the lawn was mowed. At least it was being kept up.

About a year later, my wife and I were taking a walk by it, and the garage door was open and a guy was mowing the lawn on a JD lawn tractor. I looked inside the open garage door, and there appeared to be at least a dozen cars in that house! It was a giant garage! :laughing:

The guy two houses over saw it was in disrepair, contacted the owners, made an offer, had it hauled off, and put up the house-looking garage to store his classic cars in. Pretty nice!

 

[MossRoad]

My parents had a pretty simple will...
mom dies = dad gets everything
dad dies = mom gets everything
mom and dad die = children get everything split evenly X ways.
If one kid wants house(s) have to purchase it/them from other siblings at 90% of market value.
If two kids want house(s), house(s) gets sold and children get everything spilt evenly X ways if they can't come to an agreement.

Fortunately, no children wanted either house so they were sold and money split evenly.
One sibling and I were made co-executors. None of the other siblings had a problem with that.
Executors are entitled to a bit more for their work, however, my sibling and I took that extra money and divided it evenly between all siblings.
There were an odd number of us, so I shorted myself part of a penny to make it even.

Again, I was fortunate to have a bunch of siblings that didn't fight over anything in the estate and all ended very pleasantly.

When I made my will, I wanted to stipulate a bunch of stuff that our kids would have to do. My lawyer said if you try and control your kids from the grave, they'll resent it. Looking at how my parents' will went, I could then see what he was talking about. So....

If I die, my wife gets everything.
If my wife dies, I get everything.
If we both die, everything is split evenly between X children.
If one child wants the house, they can purchase it from the estate at 90% of market value.
If more that one wants the house, and they can't reach an agreement, it gets sold and the money gets put in the estate to be split evenly between X children.

 

[MossRoad]

As far as divvying up your belongings to your heirs after you're gone, has anyone given thought to that process besides listing specific things in you will?

When my father passed, he had a lot of things left over from not only himself, but my long gone mother as well.

One of my siblings offered a process to divvy up the belongings that was about as fair as could be, given the circumstances.

Each sibling got a pad of unique colored dot stickers.
We were given X number of days to go around the house and put "our" sticker on anything that we would like to have.
At the end of X days, we sorted the items into piles by color stickers. This took a few days and there were about 25 different piles.

Anything with NO sticker went to St. Vincent DePaul society and Goodwill. They came with box trucks and picked up all kinds of stuff and left happy.

Anything with NO stickers that the charities refused to take went into a 20 yard dumpster. No value to us, or the charities meant it probably had no value to anyone else, so GONE!

Then we went to piles that had only two stickers and oldest goes first and picked an item, and down the road we went. We alternated between who went first to kind of make it fair.

Then 3 sticker piles.
4 sticker piles.
5 sticker piles, etc...

It went surprisingly well.

One are where we didn't go through the sticker process was collections.
My father had a massive stamp collection, a massive fossil collection, and a massive art collection.
We all agreed that the stamps meant the most to 2 of the siblings, so we agreed to let them split them.
While we all liked fossils, we took a few choice ones, and donated the rest to his fossil club, who sorted them out and gave a collection to the state museum, one to me, and one to my nephews.
The art was split up to the siblings by agreement.

All went well.

Hope that method might work for some of you doing estate planning, or dealing with loved ones' estates and siblings/heirs.

 

[Jstpssng]

^^^
My father did similar when he divided up his parent's belongings. The house and property were already his, since he'd taken over the family greenhouse business. When he passed away I told my mother that if I could have just one of his things it would be the TO35. I still need to put up a building to store it in, then it's coming home.

 

[drssg]

I think that estate settlement depends a lot on the people involved. If the family trusts and respects each other, it will go well. If everyone is a bunch of turds, then it won't.

There was so much stuff in my father's house that the general approach was, "If you want something, take it." No one felt so strongly about a single item to argue over it. Anything unclaimed got packed up by an auction company and sold. The proceeds were evenly split.

 

[fried1765]

Exactly... Lead will be highly desirable, though. :drink:

Exactly correct!
However,.....Those who have the gold will be able to buy ANTYHING that they want.....WITH THE GOLD!
(I do have a few hundred pounds of lead also)

 

[Jstpssng]

Exactly correct!
However,.....Those who have the gold will be able to buy ANTYHING that they want.....WITH THE GOLD!
(I do have a few hundred pounds of lead also)

When it gets to that point, I wonder if I want to be around. Like anything else, gold will only be yours if you're strong enough to hold it.

 

[fried1765]

When it gets to that point, I wonder if I want to be around. Like anything else, gold will only be yours if you're strong enough to hold it.

THAT is where concealed carry might come into play!

 

[RickB]

I just laugh at people that think handguns, shotguns or rifles will be sufficient to defend their possessions if things descend into unbridled chaos.