27 Wild and Crazy Things People Put in Their Wills

1.

My vindictive grandmother left my aunt $20 as a reminder of the $20 my aunt stole from her once.

2.

Not a Lawyer, but an aging woman my family knew left her house(large, and in a very affluent neighborhood) and estate to family friends for so long as her cats were alive and taken care of in said house. After they died, the house was to be sold and the remaining estate donated.The weird thing is, it's been like 20 years and the cats are still alive.Also, they've changed color.

3.

Not a lawyer but my mom put in her will that if she dies under suspicious circumstances that my sister and I won’t be left anything. She watches a lot of true crime.

4.

Saw this answer from a similar question some time ago. When a dad died he set up financial installments so long as his daughter remains under a certain weight. Dude was controlling her diet from the grave.

5.

I (early 20s) was forced to write a will due to the health insurance i get at work, and, amongst sensible stuff, the in-house lawyer said it was totally okay for this clause to be added:"My funeral wishes are that i be buried in a coffin which has been springloaded, such that opening the coffin would cause alarm to future archeologists"Then a bunch of stuff about if this is to costly i'd be cremated and have my ashes scattered in a specific place.

6.

Not a lawyer, but I work at a law firm. One client left $100,000.00 to his two cats so they could "maintain their current lifestyle".

7.

When my grandfather passed his will asked that I clean out his shed, and I alone.I found marijuana seeds, old reel style film pornography, which was hilarious and a bunch of other unsavory paraphernalia. 50's flick knives too.

8.

Just last week I handled a matter where the parents left millions in artwork to various people, wads of cash to various charities, and only left their kids the family cats. Turns out they did it because the kids got them the cats to comfort the parents in their old age and the parents f*****g hated the cats but the kids wouldn’t let them get rid of the cats.

9.

I work in probate. The oddest thing I’ve seen in a will is to euthanize their beloved horse, have it cremated and it’s ashes scattered with the decedent. Lucky for her horse, she named a horse that was already dead so the one she got afterwards lived to see another farm.

10.

A furby collection from models collected in the late 90’s. They were convinced they would retain future value.This was 2011.

11.

Lots of people sending their friends and family on weird errands to spread their ashes (leaving money for people to take trips and spread their ashes around the world). Pet trusts are a fun one: leaving a whole whack of money in a trust to be used for the care of the pet during their life. However, my favorite ever (that I obviously didn’t draft) was a lawyer who left the bulk of his estate (millions in today’s dollars) to whatever Toronto-area woman had the most children at a specific date some years in the future. I recall the winner had 10.

12.

My own grandmother specified which of the children and grandchildren should get which of the family recipes, and somehow felt the need to include commentary about why certain decisions were made. One recipe was this Prohibition-era recipe for beer which I knew my uncle, also a home brewer, wanted, but she left it to me, with the comment that "I know you wanted it, Teddy, but she has the second-best penmanship of the girls and will make you a copy."

And then like eight pages later, in among the specific descriptions of her vast collection of romance novels (really,) was a line: "And [specific Jude Devereaux title] to Spidey, who will please subtract about half the hops before she copies the beer recipe for her Uncle Teddy so that any of us can drink it.

Our Jon had his IPA last summer and just about died."Uncle Jon just about burst into tears laughing and Uncle Teddy had long since left the room because he has no f***s whatsoever to give about romance novels.

Uncle Jon, of course, was still in the room because there was also still Yuengling. And no, I have no idea how she got this will done. My guess is she wrote it herself and the law students who come to her independent-living building signed off on it. It was...elaborate, that's for sure. The total value of the estate was well under eight thousand dollars, so it was mostly a funny last letter from Grandma.

13.

"No, ma'am, in order to bequeath something, you actually have to own it."

14.

I am a qualified solicitor, my favourite two are:1. A lady wanted to create a trust fund of £100,000, for her pet fish. When I asked if it was a special kind of fish, she confirmed it was just a normal goldfish but she wanted it to be fed fresh avocado every day and be looked after by a local dog walker after she died. She was absolutely serious.2. Another lady confessed she had a secret daughter, and she wanted to leave the daughter some money and photographs without the rest of her family finding out. Even her husband does not know. That will be a fun conversation when she passes away.

15.

I had the first son so my dad decided to leave me more. Except he did the math wrong and it came out to 105%. He had dementia.

16.

My sister’s mother in-law is leaving her house to her three sons. If one wants to sell out his third of the house, he has to sell it to the other two brothers for $1.

17.

Might be late to the party and not a lawyer, but my great-grandad had a clause in his will that stated something along the lines of, “if any of the beneficiaries decide to dispute the contents of the decedent’s estate, their share becomes $1 and nothing else.”Seemed like a pretty good way to maintain harmony among his survivors.

18.

Had a very attractive woman with terminal cancer try to get herself stuffed by a taxidermist and given to some rich guy that had been basically a sugar daddy to her for a few months. She said "He would give me a million dollar a week allowance as long as it was in an official will that he could see." I sent her to a lawyer who I knew that would do about anything for a buck because I didn't want to end up in the news when she died. That was 2 years ago, no clue what happened to her.

19.

Lady wanted her small dog to be buried with her. If the dog happened to be alive when the lady passed, she wanted the dog put down and then join her.

20.

In my Mums will, which I have seen, she has left me the kitchen table and chairs. She lives on a South Manchester council estate. My brother gets the sideboard.

21.

Client wanted her ashes spread at the restaurant (on the beach) where she met her husband.

22.

i got some rock my grandpa really liked

23.

My grandfather left me $1.00, he had dementia and confused my dad ripping him off with me. He left the rest of the family between $100,000 And a few million each.They all said they felt horrible because they knew the details, but not horrible enough to give up any of their share.The way I see it is it was never my money to begin with, so it's not a loss. I'm just glad my sister got a hundred thousand,she needed it more than any of the others.

24.

When my great grandad died in his will he stated that his coin collection be split equally across his family. There was like 8-9 of us and 3 potato sacks full of coins. So we all gathered round a table and each took one coin each until nothing was left. Among the coins was an Iron Cross, which was quiet odd as the only person on that side of the family that went to war was his dad, and he served with the ANZAC’s in WW1.

25.

Here’s one from one of my dad’s law partners. He had a lady come in with an itemized list of books and wanted her will to contain all of the books and who will get what based on her choosing. So basically she decides who gets what specific book instead of letting her beneficiaries decide. The truly astonishing thing is how many books and how specific they get. According to dad’s law partner her list is at about 2,000 books to be divided among about 30 people. She is apparently very specific and comes back at least once a year to add all the new books she’s gotten.

26.

Not a lawyer but my grandpa put in his will a chocolate bar for everyone one of his grand kids. Well I have like 12 cousins and very difficult to track down where a couple of them went. All this estates and money he had in will was at a stand still for months because they couldn’t find my couple cousins. Had to show court we put in effort to hire someone to track them down etc. The lawyer that was helping execute the Will was blown away that this lawyer allowed this and why he wouldn’t highly suggest not to do it. But I’m not complaining cause I got a Toblerone out of the deal!

27.

I’m the executor of my grandmother’s will. I also get the house and everything in it and a share of life insurance that’s split three ways between myself, sister, and mom. My mom has always said that all my dad , my grandmothers son-in-law, would like to have is some table. Well in the will there’s like a whole paragraph that states how my dad gets nothing, he doesn’t lay a finger on any thing in the house or any money. How my dad is basically worthless and deserves nothing and how he was a c**p dad and that she begrudgingly has my mom in the will. Thanks grandma I’ll appreciate the awkwardness.

28.

My father is heavily involved in my great aunt and uncle's lives since their health has begun to decline (both mid 90's with no children), and has seen their will.They have a small fortune (in excess of £1,000,000), and have left it all to a local dog's home.When he asked them about it, my great uncle's response was "nobody has helped me in life, so I won't be helping anybody either."

29.

"Not a lawyer" but I worked with plenty of estates and trust accounts over the years. This particular scenario isn't so much about the will itself being strange, but the circumstances that led up to the trust account is opened: I used to work at a bank in the estate's department. I was an administrator who had to manage the files including encroachments upon the capital (i.e. "I want to take some money out now, please"). I had this one account - a multi-million dollar trust for one single beneficiary - the son of the deceased. What's interesting is that the son killed the parents... with a hammer in a grotesque and brutal fashion.

He pleaded insanity. He would call once a year from the penitentiary / mental hospital, requesting $50 for commissary (to buy chips and gum). The call was always strange. He was very polite, very doped up. The quality of the call was always very "tinny" like he was far away from the phone.

30.

I once wrote a will for a guy who thought he could get away from giving his ex-wife half his assets by putting them in a will for his kids. Doesn’t work like that, buddy boy.