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These are real situations we have met. We have changed anything that would identify a person or a property. We share them because every one of them had a point where a conversation would have been easier than it is now. That point does not announce itself. It just passes.
She is 77. The house was built in the 1920s and it is coming apart. Code enforcement had already put liens on it. Then a letter came saying they meant to tear it down. She had not lived inside it for months. She was living in her car, parked outside it. Asked what her plan was, she said she would let them knock it down and live in a tent on the empty lot. There is a rule against that too. It took about an hour on the phone before she was willing to look at another way through it.
Nobody in the family ever opened a probate. The woman who owned the house died a long time ago. So did all six of her children. A grandson took the house on without any paperwork, and then he died too. The person left holding it is his niece. For years she has paid the property taxes out of her own pocket on a house she has no legal right to sell, cannot rent, and cannot walk away from. Asked what she wanted, she said she would like to sell it. She did not know what she was allowed to do, or who to ask.
The will ran to 51 pages. The heir who inherited the problem did not understand it. Another relative disputed who was really in charge of the estate. The attorney who had been handling it was gone. So the estate sat, and the property sat with it, while the people who could have moved it forward argued about who was allowed to.
She owns several properties. One of them is empty. The taxes on it are behind and the city has open violations against it. She will not sell it, because she means to leave her properties to her nephews and she is set on that. Her plan is to borrow against the failing one to keep it. Meanwhile it keeps deteriorating, and what is owed on it keeps growing. The house she is keeping for them is the one that is costing them.
We don't tell these stories to frighten you. We tell them because the one thing every person in these situations wishes they had done differently is the same: they wish they had made the call sooner.