Easy to say when not only is it not happening to you but you haven't spent years engaging with the legal process and waiting for the estate to try and make sure you can't have it. The possibility of winning a jackpot would grow on you, you'd start to imagine what it would be like to keep it and the brothers, being your adversaries, would look less deserving than they do to an outsider.
If this person had intentionally done this to my benefit over their children and it was current then sure I'd take the money.
But if it's a 50 years old out of date commitment to a life long gone and there are other genuinely more deserving in terms of being actually children then yeah I'd give it to them.
I'd just see it as a kind of a bank error. If the bank drops 1 million bucks into your account what would you do? I'd give it back. There have been cases reported of this in Australia where people do spend the money that the bank inadvertently puts in their account - I find that hard to understand. Actually I find it easy to understand but disappointing that people are so willing to do the crime just because its offered to them easy. Not suggested that in the case of this will it would be a crime, just suggesting that there's a right thing to do.
And I have done stuff like that. About 30 years ago I got paid about $7,000 for a software job by a client then got paid a second time. I just called em up and gave it back.
> There have been cases reported of this in Australia where people do spend the money that the bank inadvertently puts in their account - I find that hard to understand.
It happened to me once and it never occurred to me I could spend the money just because someone made a mistake. If I was stupid enough to spend it, I would have to give it back anyway, so what's the point?
> but you haven't spent years engaging with the legal process and waiting for the estate to try and make sure you can't have it
I mean in the proposed alternative that wouldn't happen because you would tell them "hey I think this is a mistake, i think he just forgot to update the beneficiary". You only have the years of legal process where you decide that you should keep the money.
I think I'd give some back. No way you'd really give $1m back though unless you really didn't need it (possible here). I would say morally nobody is really entitled to inheritance and they clearly don't need the money, so you're doing them a favour by giving it back.
Wealth doesn't breed morality. Morality is something that cuts across all wealth lines. Poor people aren't all criminals and rich people aren't all saints.
If only I was rich. I'm not. As the other commenter says, doing the right thing isn't about money. Integrity is doing the right thing even when no-one is looking.
It also depends on your political beliefs about inheritance and merit.
I don’t think anyone "deserve" to inherit. It’s just money you never worked to get and that you get because your parents had extra money.
So, morally, why would the brothers deserve more the money than the ex girlfriend ? Maybe they were still in good terms. Maybe she brought more joy in his life than his brothers. Maybe not but enough for her to get her share. Or just maybe he didn’t care enough about this and should be considered ok with the outcome.
You don’t deserve 1 more million on your bank account because you happened the brother of someone. Yes it may happen eventually but that’s just luck.
And I’m not taking side for anyone here. I can totally understand why the brothers would be upset and I would probably be if I were in their shoes. But at the same time, as someone who doesn’t count on his brother’s death to become rich, I’ll have a hard time being empathetic.
They should at least be upset about the carelessness of your brother rather than the ex girlfriend.
tl:dr; You are allowed to think that doing the right thing is not to give the money back because it was never meant to be theirs.
You don't deserve to get money, but you do deserve to have the money you did deserve go somewhere of your choosing.
In this case, as you say, the guy didn't put much care into the issue, so we don't have to worry too much about if our decisions are what he would have chosen. What he chose was to barely consider the matter and mostly leave it up to others to figure out.
The fact he did remove the 2nd gf is interesting but probably has 2 arguments that cancel out. A, he removed the 2nd ex from insurance as soon as she was an ex, so in general he doesn't intent for exes to still be beneficiaries. B, he removed the 2nd and only didn't remove the 1st, so keeping the 1st on was intentional.
I do not think the 1st was intentional, but not taking care of this stuff in general was intentional, so he gets what he gets.
The brothers, well it's unfortunate that unfortunately they had a careless brother. If the court gives it to the ex, no great travesty has happened. The state is only deciding because the guy largely didn't bother deciding for himself.
That is literally debatable. The definition of legitimately in this case is literally not clear and quite arguable. You have merely picked a side, not pointed out some obvious definitive truth.
The ex legitimately has a claim. The strength of the claim is still to be decided.
If the process by which one becomes a beneficiary is swiss cheese, that does matter.
That changes the strength of the very word beneficiary in the statement "beneficiary until proven otherwise". It's now only "maybe beneficiary until proven otherwise."
In other words, arguable, requiring to be determined.
You're not the thing until proven otherwise, the thing has to be proven in the first place now.
The deceased person's estate, yeah. Often it's possible to simply disclaim an inheritance and you would therefore never receive the money; but sometimes that means it would go to your heirs.
With a $1M account, it's a lot easier to say you would return it than to actually do it though. That's life changing money and it's hard to say no to life changing money.
Yeah. To their "estate". It's mentioned that some of his assets that didn't have a beneficiary named landed there and I think they were to be split according to the will of the deceased.
I think beneficiary trumps everything. But we are talking about what you could do with the money if you were (undeserving) beneficiary. Giving it back to the dead person (precisely donating it to their estate) is the right thing to do although probably imperfect because donations are often taxed.