Legal Question in Wills and Trusts in California

In December last year, my father passed away from cancer. My uncle, his attorney, was left as executor and with power of attorney. My father had put all his personal property and one piece of real estate in a trust 6 months earlier to protect it from probate in case his cancer treatment failed.

My brother and I (My fathers only two heirs) wanted to take care of the legal stuff immediately but my Uncle has dragged his feet for the past 6 and a half months saying that he cannot execute the will and trust until all my fathers personal property has been accounted for, and unfortunatly one piece of worthless furniture cannot be accounted for as my aunt has it and will not return it. Both my brother and I have told him to forget about this one piece of furniture, as we do not want it, but he refuses.

Now my Uncle is saying he's wasted too much time on this issue and is trying to withdraw from his responsibilities as executor and P.O.A. I'm 22 and my brother is 24, we have no legal experience and make next to nothing, so we cannot afford a lawyer to close the trust and draft the grant deed. I can't see how it can be legal for him to accept these responsibilities while my father is alive and then back out 6 months after his death while leaving us with this mess.

On top of all of that, during the 6 months he's been stalling, our uncle has spent around $5000 dollars (or so he says, he refuses to produce any accounting records) paying the rent for my dads storage units, which we told him to get rid of immediately after my father died. Now he is trying to take that $5000 out of our very limited cash inheritance, saying it's owed to him, despite the fact that we told him specifically that paying for storage wasn't necessary as everything in there was junk anyways.

One other thing to note is that our aunts offered to take over the storage units in return for whatever is inside about 6 months ago, and my brother and I tried to sign it over to them... my uncle blocked it, and has now been holding the fact that I 'illegally assaulted my fathers trust and committed fraud' over my head, even going as far to threaten me with it (I'm on probation for a stupid teen incident) if I don't cooperate with him.

Does anyone have any advice? As I said before, we cannot afford an attorney on our own.


Asked on 6/16/10, 11:48 pm

1 Answer from Attorneys

This is not a fight you can win on your own. You don't even know to tell us who the named beneficiaries of the trust are. Presumably it is you two, but that you don't even mention it indicates that you will be tripped up constantly if you try to take action yourself. You need to find an attorney who will take the case and agree to be paid out of your inheritance once you get it.

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Answered on 6/23/10, 9:36 am


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