October estate planning question, “I’m rich and eccentric and live in a mansion full of ghosts. Can I leave my mansion to beneficiaries contingent on them spending 24 hours in the mansion with the ghosts?”
I’m Sarah Siedentopf, I’m an estate planning attorney in Atlanta, Georgia. And my answer to this is going to be, yes, I think that you could. There are a very limited number of things that you are not allowed to do, and they are things that are considered to be against public policy. So we are not allowed to say, “I leave my haunted mansion to my sister only if she divorces her husband, who I do not like.” She still gets the mansion regardless of whether she divorces the husband, that’s against public policy to try to force someone to marry, to break up marriages, to make requirements around having children, or not having children. These things are in a category of against public policy. There are probably, you know, all sorts of things we could come up with that are egregious and we could consider against public policy, but those are easy examples.
Staying overnight in a house 24 hours, I’m gonna say that’s not against public policy particularly given that ghosts are not usually addressed in the law. So I think you can do this. I think this does work, and you know, is it likely to lead to a will contest? I think it is. But I think your will could stand up. So if you have enough money that you don’t care about some of it being spent on a will contest, I think we can do this. But it really leads me to the bigger question. The thing that I run into in practice more often, which is, “Can I leave this to someone during their lifetime and then have it go to someone else?” Or can I leave this, you know, sort of the same idea, different wording. “Can I leave my house to so and so with the stipulation that they never sell it? And those are very scary, as far as I’m concerned, because there’s so much that can go wrong here especially when we’re thinking about the leave it to so-and-so during their lifetime.
It’s basically what we would call a life estate. Yes, you can do this, but there’s all sorts of, you know what if they stop paying for upkeep of the house? What if they can’t pay the taxes? What if they’re no longer living in the house? So there’s all sorts of things that you have to think about and work around. So if you do that wrong, that can be just as scary as overnight with ghosts. But yeah, in answer, I do believe that in Georgia that that will would probably stand up.
You can force your beneficiaries to spend a night in your haunted mansion in order to inherit. If you have a haunted mansion, maybe don’t call me. But otherwise, please reach out if you’ve got questions about estate planning.
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