Re: Raccoons and the modern urban environment

On Sun, 5 Aug 2007 15:31:46 +0100, "Arwel Parry"
<arwel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


"Paul Dormer" <prd@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:memo.20070803175202.3252A@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
In article <JM60sL.1uE@xxxxxxxxxxx>, djheydt@xxxxxxxxxxx (Dorothy J
Heydt) wrote:

I'm sorry about your father.

But there we are: my father dropped dead thirty years ago and
didn't leave me a dime.

Well, he didn't leave enough for the heirs to have to pay death duty,
but it did include a four-bedroomed semi-detached house in the north of
England which none of us wanted. The estate was basically split three
ways between his children, with smaller gifts to his three
grandchildren.

My sister was handling the probate, as it's something she knows about.
About three months ago, she e-mailed me to say a cheque was on the way.
I'd just booked my hotel for Nippon, which required paying in advance,
so I remarked the money had come just in time. She replied that when
she'd been sending a cheque to her son, she'd told him not to fritter
it away. She wasn't sure if spending the money on a holiday counted as
frittering. "No," I said, "A holiday was a necessity, not frittering.
Now, the widescreen LCD TV I'm about to buy, that's frittering." Her
view was that she didn't consider that frittering, as she was about to
buy one, too.

Ah, Inheritance Tax, what joy! Did you know that the guide to how to fill in
the basic Inheritance Tax form is 154 pages long? I've had occasion to get
into the details of taxes in the last few fraught months - one of my
father's brothers-in-law died in April leaving me 2% of his estate (well, I
wasn't expecting anything as I hadn't had much to do with him for 30
years...), but he had received some £60K in compensation for a nasty car
crash he was an innocent victim of a few years ago, so together with his
house he had quite a reasonable estate. Then my mother died four weeks ago
tonight - time seems to have gone really quickly - so I get basically just
under half her estate, as does my brother, with my nephews getting small
bequests each and my sister-in-law gets her jewellery and her best tea
service (whichever that is, she had about half a dozen!). She'd tried to
safeguard her assets by giving the house to my brother and me back in 1994,
but because she didn't pay a market rent to us then for the purpose of IHT
we didn't get possession of the house to do as we liked with until she went
into hospital and then a nursing home four months ago, so it still gets
counted towards the IHT allowance (though the estate's still a long way
short of this year's £300K limit, so we won't actually have to pay any) and
we have a potential Capital Gains Tax liability for the appreciation in the
house's value between 1994 and 2007! Apart from which, we've no idea how
much it was worth in 1994 - it was bought for £26,500 in 1985, and we've
agreed a private sale to the woman next door's parents for £195K. Two days
later my father's last brother died and it seems that his estate (yet
another bungalow and around £100K in cash) it being divided equally between
his younger sister and 13 of us nephews and nieces (except for £10K which
the HSBC will charge for being executor, but none of us fancied doing the
job, and split 14 ways the bill doesn't look so outrageous); it's a bit of a
mystery why he didn't leave something to his older sister but he might have
reasoned that she's 87 now and probably couldn't use it, and her son gets
one of the shares anyway. £200K seems to be the going rate for detached
bungalows in the upper Vale of Clwyd at the moment.

Strangely, I'm not planning on buying an LCD TV - my house could do with a
fair bit of renovation, though, and I might park a fair amount in Premium
Bonds in the hope that ERNIE will notice it more than it did the single £1
bond my mother bought back in 1971 :)

I'm glad you'll be able to renovate your house, but sorry about all
the deaths in the family so recently.
--
Marilee J. Layman
http://mjlayman.livejournal.com
.

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