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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: March 3rd, 2024

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  • I’m afraid this is going to get a lot worse before it gets better. Any time someone passes and leaves an estate, there’s a strong opportunity for beneficiaries and interested parties to get into some serious conflicts. Your grandmother hasn’t passed, and there’s already conflict starting.

    If your grandmother does not want to (or “isn’t allowed to”) walk away from the house and its mortgage (while living literally rent free until the foreclosure process goes through), you are going to need to protect yourself. You should start planning that now. Speak to an estate attorney now, and figure out what you need to do to make sure that you personally are able to reject being a beneficiary of the house, hopefully without also having to turn down beneficiary status on anything else. Maybe there’s a way that you can have your “share” of the property divided equally among the other beneficiaries as a gift?

    No matter what happens, you’re going to have to personally “let go” of some proceeds of the estate, and you’ll need to do it without holding a grudge against your siblings.






  • In the US:

    When you pass away, your mortgage doesn’t suddenly disappear. Your mortgage lender still needs to be repaid and could foreclose on your home if that doesn’t happen. In most cases, the responsibility of the mortgage will be passed to the beneficiary of the home if there is a will.

    https://www.bankrate.com/mortgages/what-happens-to-mortgage-when-you-die/

    This partially depends on how much the house is worth now. If it’s somehow a million dollar house today, and the amount owed is $250K, then you could refinance that and make payments. This would be a reasonable transaction.

    But if you have negative equity - if you owe more than the house is worth - the best thing to do right now is stop paying that mortgage. In the short term, you’re just throwing money away, because that mortgage is never going to be paid off. In the longer term, see the above. Stop paying the mortgage.

    Yes, this will end in foreclosure. Yes, you’ll “lose the house,” but honestly, it was lost a long time ago, you just didn’t know it. Once the foreclosure has happened, your grandmother will be relieved of that debt, because the home was collateral. Foreclosure is highly likely to happen anyway after your grandmother passes, but then it becomes infintely more complicated, especially if there are multiple beneficiaries of the property.

    My in-laws were in a similar situation long ago. They had gotten a now-illegal “reverse amoritization mortgage,” which basically guaranteed that their mortgage payments would always be less than the interest accrued. Same kind of result: they owed way more on the house than it was worth, way more than they had originally borrowed, and were essentially never going to get out from under it. The advice they took was exactly as above. Stop paying the mortgage.









  • For a gun to be effective against an attacker, that attacker needs to be about 25 feet away or farther when you decide to shoot them. Closer than that, it’s a melee before you get an accurate shot off.

    This means that you need to escalate a situation to gunplay way before you’re in actual physical danger, in most cases.

    Unless you’re walking along brandishing your weapon, in order to be ready for a possible threat. This in itself escalates any situation you’re in to “one with a gun in it,” whether you’re ever in any danger or not.

    Small arms are offensive weapons. They cannot be used for defense without making otherwise safe conditions unsafe, or by escalating a possibly threatening situation into a definitely dangerous one.