When Trust Services Included Immortality

 From an April 1959 issue of The New Yorker:

[An old post that seemed worth repeating.]

1924: A Well-Placed Executorship Ad

Location, location, location . . . .

During unrelated research I came across this ad in The New York Times for March 21, 1924, artfully positioned next to the death notices.

Politics: Another Reason to Pick a Professional Executor

Is It OK to Cut My Trump-Supporting Relatives Out of My Will?

Digital Assistants for the Individual Executor

If you're the executor of your rich uncle's estate, you can hire a trust company to handle much of the drudgery. Executors of smaller estates may find help online. Executor.org charges $99 a year, EstateExec has a $79 one-time fee. Both encourage the amateur executor to keep good records.

Do you know of other noteworthy sources of online assistance?

My New Executor? Software Code, of Course!

"This is the first time in legal history that the administration of a will is handed over to a non-human. In this case, software code is the executor." So boasts Bockchain Apparatus, a Bitcoin 2.0 startup.

The company says that in the foreseeable future we will have a software/network combination which is the executor of the decedent's last will and testament. Bitcoin 2.0 protocols are used to make actual dispositions and disbursements of the assets in an estate, and are able to do so while taking into consideration many facts which are indeterminate at the time of the will's creation, similar to traditional trust frameworks.

 The software "executor" function is built into a blockchain will, which can be updated and revised.

O brave new world, that has such computer code in't!

Quick Quiz, Christmas Edition

Who is fiction's best known executor?

Choose a Corporate Executor

From Money: How To Pick a Pro to Manage Your Money When You’re Gone.

Bill for Settling Leona Helmsley's Estate: $100 Million

Settling the $5.4 billion estate left by Leona Helmsley had its challenges, according to this Daily News dispatch:

The four executors who filed their request in Manhattan Surrogate's Court were two Helmsley grandsons, Walter and David Panzirer, her longtime attorney Sandor Frankel and friend John Codey. [A fifth executor was Leona's brother, now deceased.] 

According to court papers, the executors quietly sold off $2 billion in government bonds, handled her interests in more than 80 properties — including the Empire State Building — and dealt with her financial stake in five corporations and 27 businesses. 

In addition, they convinced a judge to trim the $12 million bequest from Helmsley to her dog Trouble to $2 million and sorted out a dicey challenge to her will by a pair of disinherited grandkids.

For completing those tasks and more, the executors request a fee of $100 million.

Executors and Their Troubles

Oleg Cassini

Oleg Cassini's executor suspended. The designer died in 2006, leaving most of his estate to his wife. One of Cassini's daughters from his previous marriage to movie star Gene Tierney successfully contested the will.

Thereafter Cassini's widow seems to have lost interest in settling the estate. A Manhattan probate judge has suspended her as executor, pending a decision as to whether she should be replaced.

Fireman's executor overwhelmed. Nearly three years after a volunteer fireman in New Jersey died, "none of the beneficiaries have received their disbursements from his estate. The lack of action — and alleged dearth of communication with the executor — prompted borough officials to file a lawsuit compelling executor John Benensky of Madison to fulfill his fiduciary duty and give a formal accounting of the estate."

The estate includes a business and is valued at over $1 million. Agreeing to serve, says the overwhelmed executor, was "a spur of the moment” decision. He had no idea the job would be so complicated.

Replaced executor fights for the job. A few months before she died, an elderly widow executed a codicil to her 2010 will. Her amendment made no changes to the disposition of her $22 million estate; the codicil merely replaced the lawyer she had named as her executor with three new co-executors.

After the widow's death the lawyer fought to regain his appointment as executor (and as successor trustee of the widow's living trust). Failing in probate court, he appealed. Now the appeals court has rebuffed him:

A person who was named as an executor in a will cannot contest a codicil by which the testator named someone else to that position.

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Estate settlement is a task that sometimes involves big money and often stirs strong emotions. Maybe naming a dull, disinterested bank as executor isn't such a bad idea.

How UK Banks Garner Executorships

Banks in Britain can offer will-writing services. Good way to pick up executorships? You bet.

Maybe too good.

When the Rich Get Poorer, Lawyers Get Richer

When somebody says, "It's not about the money," it usually turns out to be about the money.

Could the reverse also be true?

Ronald Perelman's legal battle with his former in-laws certainly seems to be about the money. Perelman believes his former father-in-law reneged on a promise to leave half the family media business to Perelman's former wife. She died in 2007. Perelman is executor of her will, and the will's main beneficiary is his daughter Samantha.

But so far, the battle has consumed millions. The former in-laws claim Perelman has burned through $20 million in litigation costs. By one estimate, the two sides have together enriched lawyers by $60 million.

The figure should keep on growing as the two sides contend in a New Jersey court this week.

The Trust Company That Saved Olana

When Don Draper, Roger Sterling and the other Mad Men leafed through the April 27, 1968 issue of The New Yorker, surely they stopped at this lavish two-page spread from Bankers Trust.

The trust company had held Olana, home of famed artist Frederick Church, in an estate long enough for preservationists to save it. The self-congratulatory copy was possibly overdone. Just imagine the news items had the decision gone the other way:

"Only months before preservationists could raise money to save Frederick Church's Persian-styled home on the Hudson, Bankers Trust ordered the contents sold and the mansion razed." Would have been bad PR, to say the least.

Today Olana survives but Bankers Trust does not. After misadventures with derivatives, the trust company was acquired by Deutsche Bank in 1998.

Clouds over Olana, by Frederic Edwin Church, 1872

Why Executors Always Should Look in the Barn

After the death of Baroness Gisela von Krieger in 1989, lawyers settling her estate found this remarkable asset in the family's Greenwich, CT barn.

At Gooding's Pebble Beach auction, the 1936 Mercedes-Benz 540 K Special Roadster sold for $11,770,000. You can read all about the car – only 30 were built and perhaps a dozen survive – and the Baroness here.

These Trust Officers Are The Cat's Meow

Georgia Lee Dvorak died last December,. Her will instructs her executor to put to death any of her cats who survive her. Bad news for Boots, who did.

Happily, the executor is a bank, The trust officers "got a Cook County probate court to set aside that part of the 1988 document because they found a shelter to take the 11-year-old cat."

See Executors of will save cat.

Fifth Third has got to be one of the best-named banks in the country. Not surprising that it has cool trust officers.

The Executor Was a Shirker

Another case illustrating the advisability of naming a corporate executor – and a reminder that IRAs are not probate assets.

IN RE ESTATE OF KAMPEN

In Praise of the Corporate Executor

From Canada's Financial Post: Choosing an executor is more than an honour.

Corporate executors can help the family cope with complex decisions and details reducing the potential for conflict. They could help reduce the liability that an executor may face for wrong decision, and provide access to a dedicated team of professionals for the efficient settlement of the estate, maximizing value for the beneficiaries – which in the end, is what you want most, isn’t it?

Executor: A Bank to be Named Later

From Choosing the Right Executor for Your Estate in the NY Times:

Considering the changes in the financial services industry, Alan Gassman, a lawyer with Gassman, Bates & Associates in Clearwater, Fla., advises clients not to name a specific bank or trust company in their will. Instead, he advises them to appoint someone they trust to interview trust companies, negotiate fees and select one when the need arises.

Billions in Unclaimed Life Insurance and Other Property

No need to look under sofa cushions to find lost money. Paul Sullivan's Wealth Matters column spotlights unclaimed life insurance proceeds. By one guesstimate, well over $1 billion nationwide is waiting to be claimed.

That's nothing, relatively speaking. Unclaimed property of all sorts, ranging from safe deposit valuables to old paychecks and dividends, adds up to $33 billion or so.

How hard do payers look for potential payees? Not very, judging from this Marketwatch item. With a smidgen of due diligence the Walt Disney Co. might have found an address for Angelina Jolie. Somebody at Apple probably knows Steve Jobs.

Death, followed by amateur executorship, explains why much of the $33 billion in lost property remains unclaimed. A diligent bank executor doesn't work for free, but occasionally a trust department may find as much as it charges.

Know of any good examples? Send them along to Jim Gust.

This Bear Market is Really Nice

"Rich." "High Net Worth." We toss those terms around as if wealth were stable and easy to value. Ha! Priced Florida condos or Arizona tract houses lately?

Yet if some of yesteryear's six-figure assets are now worth little, items once purchased for a pittance may now represent real money.

Paul Greenwood, who turned a hedge fund into "sort of a Ponzi scheme," spent $3 million of his loot on old teddy bears. Tomorrow Christie's auctions them off, including this distinctive Steiff harlequin bear.

For another glimpse of old stuff that now possesses significant value, see The Telegraph's Rare and Unusual Ephemera for Sale.

Who knew an autographed color photo of Nixon was a collector's item?

Moral: Name an experienced trust bank as your executor. A trust officer will seek the expert advice necessary to determine that your comic book collection is now worth more than your Vegas penthouse.

An Executor Most Eloquent

Born 300 years ago this month, Samuel Johnson played the words of the English language like a master organist improvising on Bach.

At the death of is his friend Henry Thrale, a wealthy brewer and Member of Parliament, Johnson became one of Thrale's executors. Johnson's particular concern, his biographers tell us, was the running of the brewery and its sale for the best possible price.

Centuries later, Johnson's sales pitch, recorded by Boswell, lives on in books of quotations:

“We are not here to sell a parcel of boilers and vats, but the potentiality of growing rich, beyond the dreams of avarice.”