Your Turn with Mike Causey

In many ways, the way you handle your final affairs will determine how your family and friends remember you. So it’s important to get it right. Years ago, my uncle died and left his large, 700-plus acre farm (for comparison, New York’s Central Park is about 840 acres) to his daughter. Not his wife. On purpose. Or so he thought! He knew exactly what he was doing! That is, he thought he knew what he was doing. But instead of making a postmortem point, he messed up. Big time. It was not his first will. Nor (maybe) his last. That’s because he wrote wills all the time. Sometimes to punish some individual or group. And that may have made him feel good, or at least satisfied. But in the end it created a mess. Why? Because the only will that counts is the last one you wrote (or that your family finds) that was done properly. The notarized copy his wife found became the official one. It cut her out of the farm. Or so he thought. What apparently happened is that my uncle, acting as his own attorney-estate planner,