Legal Question in Credit and Debt Law in Wisconsin

Children's Responsibility for Debts of Parents

I am not aware of any legal duty is Wisconsin to support one's parents. Children therefore technically have no liability for obligations of their parents unless they somehow obligate themselves by other means, such as signing an agreement to become a "responsible party." As a practical matter, however, many vendors will require you to do exactly that before they continue to provide goods and services to an indigent elderly person. In any event, the utility would have a good common law argument that an adult child would be liable if the child benefited from the service provided, i.e., lived in the house heated by the father's utility account or if the father was intentionally made indigent by the estate planning activities of the child. Either way, unless incurred by some sort of fraud, past utility bills are normally are dischargeable in bankruptcy, although the utility will require a deposit for future services.