SCARY CAMPFIRE STORIES WITH OLG: SERJ’S BANE AKA THE FAMILY COTTAGE

What comes to mind when you think of a family cottage? Shared memories. Shared laughs. Beautiful, endless summers as a kid. Complete nightmare as an adult?

If the following story feels a little too close to home, it's not about you, really.  It is just all too common of a story. The following are purely fictional events in our series of stories built around the Fettuccine family. Today’s story follows Serj Fettucine as he navigates the lot left him by his parents’ lack of planning…

As a child, my parents bought a cottage on a beautiful lake.  Many summer vacations were spent at the cottage; swimming in the lake, biking in the woods, sitting around a campfire telling stories.  Especially scary stories.

But let me tell you the really scary story of how our family cottage ended up in a legal battle.

When we first started going to the cottage, everyone looked forward to spending time together there.  As we grew older, I started to notice that my only sibling, my older sister, Janet, did not like spending time at the cottage as much as the rest of us.

Instead of playing outside and spending time with family, Janet started staying inside, complaining that there was no television, and was constantly trying to find cell phone service to call her boyfriend (whom none of us liked).

With time, my sister and I grew up and moved out of town, occasionally coming back to visit our parents and spend a weekend or two at the cottage.  After my parents passed away, we learned that they did no estate planning and did not address what should happen with the cottage upon their death.

In Wisconsin, that means that my sister and I each inherited 50% of the cottage.  Maybe my parents were blinded by their happiness of everyone being together and didn’t see it as I did, but I knew my sister had no interest in owning any part of the cottage.

At the time, my sister had married the boyfriend nobody liked and moved out of Wisconsin.  Meanwhile, I kept enjoying the cottage with my growing family and assumed all responsibility for its upkeep.  I wanted to make sure my family could continue to use and enjoy our home-away-from-home.

Just when I started to feel bad about not getting along with my sister and new brother-in-law, they got divorced (turns out we were right).  With nowhere left to go, my sister returned in the dead of winter and began living in the cottage.  After all the time and money I spent maintaining this property, with no prior notice at all, I could no longer use it when summer rolled around because my sister would not leave.  When we were kids, I didn’t think she was squatter material, but looking back…maybe she was?

To get my sister out of the cottage, I had to file a document with the court called a partition action to try and force the sale of the cottage and it is STILL ongoing.  Even when this matter is all said and done, after all the fees incurred and time spent in court, I will still only receive my one-half portion of the proceeds when the cottage sells.  All of the sweat off my own back to maintain this property for years and my sister didn’t contribute a dime, yet she will still likely get 50%. What were my parents thinking!?!?

What’s the moral of Serj’s story?

As a parent, it is important to communicate with your children and plan your approach to distributing a family vacation home. You should contact an estate planning professional to discuss the mechanisms that can be used to try to avoid situations like Serj’s.