(I don’t need no steenking will.)

Some people just don’t need a will.  But some people definitely do need a will, as illustrated by the probate I did some years ago for Joe Ferreira (not his real name.)

Despite the popular misconception that “If I don’t have a will, when I die the State of California will take all of my assets,” the California Probate Code tries its best to make sure that the property of persons who die intestate (without a will) goes to the beneficiaries they probably would have chosen themselves.

For the most part, if I die without a will, my property will go to my spouse.  If I am not married, it will go to my children.  If I have no children, it will go to the descendants of my parents (my siblings and/or nieces and nephews.)  If there are none of those, it will go to the descendants of my grandparents.  And that’s where the tricky part comes in.

Joe was from an extended Portuguese family, but he was an only child and he never married.  Therefore, his estate would go to the descendants of his grandparents.  He left a fair-sized estate and one of his relatives petitioned the court to be appointed his administrator.  The first problem was that after so many generations, nobody in the family had a complete family tree.  It took my client two or three months of sleuthing to get the names and addresses of all those entitled to inherit from Joe.

Joe’s maternal grandparents had six children, including Joe’s mother.  All of those children were deceased, but each of them left between one and six children of their own and some of those children had died leaving children in return.  Ditto for his paternal grandparents, who had seven children, including Joe’s father.  My client had to start writing and telephoning all of his cousins, who then wrote and telephoned all of their cousins and living aunts and uncles until a complete family tree was finally compiled.

So Joe’s estate was initially divided into 11 parts (for his mother’s five siblings and his father’s six siblings.)  But none of those 11 people were still around.

One of them had died leaving two children still living, so each of them received 1/22 of the estate.

Another left one child still living (1/22) and one child now deceased, who left four children of his own (1/88 each.)

Another had three children (all deceased, but 1/33 for each line), one of whom had three children of her own (1/99 each), but one of those had died leaving two living children (1/198 each.)

Are our heads spinning yet?

When the dust settled, some of Joe’s relatives received several thousand dollars and some of them received only a few hundred dollars.  Difficult as it was, the distribution of Joe’s estate was fair.  The problem was that nobody in the family believed Joe would have wanted this result.

So if I am unmarried with three children and die without a will, my estate will go equally to my three children.  That’s probably what I would have wanted, anyway.  I may not need a will.

Joe, however, needed a will.