For me, I'd rather not be in my family any more. I'm tired of the quibbling. I've had my life ruined by taking care of two worthless irresponsible siblings at their worst, and to hear them quibble as I manage my father's estate (which took me 21 months as I review 50 years of paperwork) and help my one sane sibling with managing my mother, who has Alzheimers. I essentially quit my job to do this - self-employed, and I was earning over 6 figures. Now - financial problems - nitpicking as I try to control the mentally ill sister and my brother complains that she is spending too much of his hard-earned inheritance (he hasn't worked since getting out of a foreign prison in 2010, nor has he helped when my sister, father and then mother got sick, nor has he helped me sort out the financial records).
I was already burned out from taking care of my kids when my wife abandoned me, claiming our deceased daughter had been murdered, and also cut off the kids. Then my sister went off her medicine, became psychotic, a few months before my father was diagnosed with cancer.
Does anyone actually feel warmed by their family at Thanksgiving when caregiving?
the exwife wanted " all this " sans the stick in the mud who built and maintained it , and the older son wanted " all that sht " that the aforementioned ex promised him with her newfound equity possibilities .
aside from the murdered son its all turned out rather comically . " their " beloved home got spent away and foreclosed , the youngest and i built ourselves a smaller -- even prettier -- one , and the ex married the local dope fkr cause he was the only one of the party cats who actually had a roof to hunker under .
the dope fkr quit meth after a good drug raid , weighs about 300 pounds and has a SS stipend that i could pay with loose change probably without even getting up out of my chair , and the ex might be going to federal prison for straw purchasing firearms .
" what goes around comes around " , at least those are the words of a cop friend of mine who can literally see the future due to his inside knowledge .
for the theory / concept of karma , and the reality of justice -- im rather thankful .
I hope things get better for you. I just celebrate with my immediate family now. I cooked for a bazillion years for all of my family and grew tired of it.
So sorry things are so screwed up. But one person can't do it all. Your going to drive yourself crazy.
Because you are the executor of the will, be sure and take the allowable fee for your services. An attorney would get paid handsomely for putting up with the garbage from your siblings.
Remember that we teach people how to treat us and only you can tell them to stop or get lost. Being noncompliant doesn't mean that you are now responsible.
I am thankful that I have set and enforced boundaries with my family and they only impinge on my life as much as I allow.
My father's estate was only $20,000, as the remainder of the assets, as I found them, were joint property between my mother and my father. I've now got her assets set up to avoid probate, with the house now in a Medicaid trust and the remainder is in IRA's she inherited from my father (IRA's are not subject to the terms of the will). The other money and assorted assets that I found that were not protected by IRA's (including a box of gold coins) have been spent on her care. I won't get anything of significance for executing the estate.
I would guess that if I had turned my father's disorganized mess over to accountants and attorneys and paralegals, it would have cost $300,000 to $500,000 in fees, and sucked away a huge portion of the estate. I had no idea when I got into this what I was getting into. I actually charge more for my time than a lawyer does when I work on an hourly basis, but I'm not allowed to bill for that as POA.
I have two siblings that are simply real trouble. Three years ago, on Christmas Eve, my youngest sister had myself and my well sister exhausted, because we were trying to get her into continued treatment after a hospitalization for a psychotic episode. She was legally homeless at that point because her landlord said that if she came back to her apartment, she would press charges, because she had moved into her landlord's house when they were gone for a day to get away from the imaginary people who were chasing her. She normally would go and live with our parents when she fell apart, but my parents weren't well enough to deal with her at that point (my father had undiagnosed cancer). She had moved in, supposedly temporarily, into my sister's house and wouldn't leave or get further treatment. Both of us spoke to countless mental health experts to try to learn how to deal with her and to try to place her, but unfortunately, most people like her are released to homeless shelters after hospitalization.
By Christmas Eve, we were exhausted from coping with her. My brother flew in 2,000 miles from the cabin he lives in the mountains, and in less than a minute had given the middle finger to my mother and I and left in a rage. The next day, he acted normally.
Last Christmas, I was going to tell my brother that he could no longer come into my house because of his tantrums and explosions, but my well sister said that she would do it instead. He told her he didn't remember giving my mother and the finger (unbelievably), and I have ignored him since then. He's probably long forgotten when he was in a cell with 6 members of the mafia of the foreign country he was imprisoned in, and that I worked with the US Embassy to get him into his own cell, cutting down on the abuse he was getting.
My psychotic sister is entitled, snotty and narcissistic (MD diagnosis, not mine) when medicated, which makes her a joy, but at least not delusional. I set up a special needs trust to take care of any inheritance she gets from my mother.
People have told me that I've learned tremendous things since taking over, about trusts and the law and countless other things that I didn't want to know. A PhD in clinical psychology told me that I could become a consultant for families on how to locate facilities for the mentally ill after hospitalization, because it comes up so much. But I don't want to do that, and didn't want to learn all of these things. I think I'm pretty good at what I do, and would like to concentrate on that, as well as visit my mother regularly while I can, rather than cope with the goofy sibling side of the family.
Extended family - the aunts, uncles, first cousins or first cousins once removed - are often much more supportive connections than your siblings. They have known you since childhood too and don't have sibling rivalry issues.
While I'm not particularly thankful for my mother who's still alive and ornerier than ever at just shy of 93, I AM thankful for my children and my husband and all but 1 of my step children. My Thanksgiving was blessedly peaceful this year because we had brunch out, mother invented an illness and couldn't join us, and things turned out very well as a result.