Successor holder and/or Beneficiary | Page 3 | General financial discussion | Discussion forum

swan said
Iir has been said here that in BC if the estate is over 250,000 you have to probate

this show the value of a bricks and motor credit union were you have a relationship with them .  

It has nothing to do with the size of the estate.

It depends on what the assets are and the risk of transferring those assets without the protection of a probated will.

I doubt any financial institution will just hand over $1 million of a deceased's assets without a probated will. If the unprobated will turns out to be invalid or the estate doesn't have enough to pay the creditors, then the creditors and rightful heirs can force the financial institution to pay that $1 million a second time to them. After all, the person named as executor in the unprobated will has no binding legal authority to act on the deceased's behalf.

I suspect there is more to your $1-million-estate-with-no-probate story than just the "relationship" you mentioned!

Bill said
No legal requirement to have a probated will but here's one reason why you might need one (from the BC gov't site):

"Whether a will needs to be probated or not depends on the agencies and financial institutions that hold assets within an estate – they may require that a will is probated before the assets are distributed or accessed by anyone."

…

That's essentially it.

Whoever is holding the assets for the deceased want legal release, when they hand over those assets, that they had fulfilled what they owe to the deceased.

A probated will provides that under provincial estate legislation. For Manitoba credit unions, there is something in the Manitoba Credit Unions and Caisses Populaires Act that provides that release for modest amounts of money ($5,000).

swan said

what is this a personal attack . so you are saying I am lying That is what happen to me . and it would not have been possible . with out the relationship you can have with a brick and mortar credit union .

But if this kind of relationship hold no value for you fine . the one I developed made a difficult time easier and cheaper and I was not the only beneficiary .

A lot has to do with how you conduct yourself in any relationship as we see here with you an uncalled for personal attack for what purpose  

Sorry, Swan. I wasn't saying that you were lying! I was trying to say that there's some important detail, not included in the story so far, that made the financial institution (a credit union?) comfortable with taking that $1 million risk.

Just a cautionary tale from my own experience: As far as having a personal relationship with a bank being helpful in these matters, my mother banked at the same local branch where she was well-known for most of her adult life. When she died, I ran into an infuriating problem where the bank wouldn't release the original will from her safety deposit box (which I had a key to as executor) without probate. And I couldn't get probate without the original will, even though I had a copy naming me as executor. An absurd catch-22 situation!
The lawyer I hired had to send angry demand letters to the bank to finally release the will. I remember him saying that he ran into this repeatedly with this bank. All of this cost money and time, and while we were trying to get the bank to release the original will, an unscrupulous relative who had talked her into joint accounts before she died was cleaning out her bank accounts and we couldn't stop it.
Hopefully this was a unique situation regarding accessing original wills from a bank, but I made a personal note not to keep my will in a safety deposit box...

Deb said
Just a cautionary tale from my own experience: As far as having a personal relationship with a bank being helpful in these matters, my mother banked at the same local branch where she was well-known for most of her adult life. When she died, I ran into an infuriating problem where the bank wouldn't release the original will from her safety deposit box (which I had a key to as executor) without probate. And I couldn't get probate without the original will, even though I had a copy naming me as executor. An absurd catch-22 situation!
The lawyer I hired had to send angry demand letters to the bank to finally release the will. I remember him saying that he ran into this repeatedly with this bank. All of this cost money and time, and while we were trying to get the bank to release the original will, an unscrupulous relative who had talked her into joint accounts before she died was cleaning out her bank accounts and we couldn't stop it.
Hopefully this was a unique situation regarding accessing original wills from a bank, but I made a personal note not to keep my will in a safety deposit box...  

You did not have the personal relationship with the bank your mother did !!

Could you have not written your own angry letter to the bank and saved those cost

In my experience, some lawyers will keep the will in their own vaults and some won't. For some people, this is a good option. However, the executor has to know who your lawyer is; you have to be reasonably confident that this law practice will still be in business when you're gone; and, if you aren't sure about the lattter, you need to know where the contents of the vault will go when the practice closes.

In Ontario at least, the Law Society has a place where the contents of the vaults of deceased lawyers are kept. However, many of these wills are never accessed because the executors have no idea who drew up the will in the first place. At last report, they were not indexed, so, if you don't know who the lawyer was, and especially if you are in a large city, you will likely never find it.

Deb said
Swan, yes you're right about me not having the relationship with the bank. Might have turned out differently if we shared the same bank, although it sounded like a fixed policy on their part. …

Probably not as the staff didn't seem to be familiar with the procedure for such situations.

The bank still owes the deceased privacy regarding the contents of the safety deposit box. However, there is a procedure for dealing with such situations, where the to-be-confirmed executor is allowed to remove the will from the safety deposit box to probate it and confirm his/her authority as the executor.

Lawyer Lynne Butler in her blog How to list the contents of the deceased's safety deposit box describes what the procedure is like:

This is a bit of a quandary at times. Nobody can go into the deceased's safety deposit box except for the executor, but you don't know who the executor is until you open the box and read the will. If this is the case, make an appointment at the bank and take a copy of the death certificate with you. You may find that the bank staff will keep the contents of the box confidential from you while they look into the box to see whether you are in fact the executor.

Once you have established that you are the executor and there is a safety deposit box, your first duty is to list the contents of the box. This is done at the bank in the presence of a bank staff member who acts as a witness. Listing the contents is exactly what it sounds like - making a detailed list of everything in the box.

…

In your first visit, you will probably not take out anything except for the original will (and as mentioned, only the executor named in the will can legally do this). That is enough to get started on the executor's duties. Make sure that before you leave the bank, you have changed the ownership of the box to the deceased's estate so that you can access it again in the future.

…

swan said

there was no trust their was a power of attorney that I had and joint title of some of the bank accounts. The bank did not know he was dead I could have taken all the money out of his name and not told them . but I thought there would likely have a duty too tell the bank he was dead . and just taking money would not be honourable . but yes we had set things up like this before the lawyer ever wrote the will . with an eye to keeping down costs  

Ah, the deceased did set up something special! It is quite significant that you both (a) had power of attorney and (b) were joint holder on the deceased's credit union accounts.

With joint accounts, there is a legal question of what the deceased holder intended:

1. Was the joint account set up to pass on the money to the surviving holder (advancement)?
2. Was the account set up just to facilitate day-to-day transactions and that, on death, the survivor would hold the money in trust for the estate (resulting trust)?

The presumption legally, of advancement or of resulting trust, is different depending on the circumstances.

With power attorney, you already had access to the money in the account and could do day-to-day transactions. Consequently, it can be argued that there was no reason for the deceased to have also made you a joint holder unless the deceased also wished to confirm that he/she wanted to pass the money to you on death.

If the money passed by way of survivorship on the joint account, then the will was not needed. A will can potentially revoke the beneficiary on an insurance policy, RRSP, RRIF, or TFSA. But, I don't think a will can change the joint owners of an account.