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ESTATE PLANNING SMARTS
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Updike’s Oversight
In most respects John Updike, the author, was vigilant about up- dating his estate plan. With handwritten changes, he kept track of outstanding loans that were to reduce his children’s inheritances. And in 1991, in notations on the will he had signed six years earlier, Updike crossed out a section in which he bequeathed $35,000 to his mother, Linda G. Updike. Above it, he inserted wording that left the “remain- ing” Pennsylvania real estate that he had inherited from her to his four children in equal shares. (Linda Updike died in 1989.)
Updike reiterated these changes in a 2006 codicil (amendment) to his will, with some elaboration. The children were also to get the money obtained from the sale of 36 acres of their grandmother’s real estate and invested for their benefit. The funds, the codicil indicates, were in a Fidelity account managed by his wife, Martha R. Updike (who was not the children’s mother). Records of these investments were kept in a tall gray filing cabinet in Updike’s office in a file labeled “MOM-MOM MONEY.”
In the same codicil, Updike left each of his children one of his possessions: a two-volume edition of Samuel Johnson’s dictionary to his daughter Elizabeth; a gateleg table to his son David; a framed and inscribed drawing by Saul Steinberg to his son Michael; and a framed James Thurber drawing to his daughter Miranda.
Another item, a 17th-century veneered bench left to his former wife, Mary Pennington Weatherall, proved problematic. In a 2012 affidavit filed in Massachusetts Probate and Family Court, Updike’s widow indicated that before he died, in 2009, Updike “gave the bench to one of his sons.” Apparently he never revised his will to reflect that fact, and it became an issue in administering his estate.
cial paperwork at a time when you may be at your most vulnerable. The 2012 tax law has added to this burden in ways that affect your own estate planning.
Keep in mind a couple of deadlines. A surviving spouse can add any unused estate tax exclusion of the just-deceased spouse to her own
$5.43 million exclusion; this is called portability (see Chapter 3). So a wid- ow can pass on as much as $10.86 million, untaxed, through either lifetime
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