In everyone's will, they get the last word and say-so when it comes to everything they own. Some requests are fairly easy, but some are straight up petty. These lawyers share the strangest requests and rules they saw in their clients' wills.
At Least She Got The Last Laugh
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ROB required an open-casket funeral, with all family members in attendance, and demanded that her corpse be dressed up like Bozo The Clown. Makeup, red nose, crazy hair, massive shoes, the works.
The family tried to protest, but ROB’s lawyer had tied this thing up beautifully. Perfectly ironclad. They either attended the Bozo the Clown funeral, or they don’t get a dime. So they did it. These stuck-up jerks had to stand there for hours, glowering, taking weird looks from all their friends & neighbors as people got close to the casket and realized ROB was dressed like a freaking clown.
According to funeral parlor employee (who had dressed ROB and applied the makeup), the best part of the service came when they tried to shut the casket and couldn’t because the massive shoes got in the way. They had to bend these 24-inch shoes in half to get the lid closed.
I never had the honor of meeting the brilliant, cantankerous old witch, but she’s one of my biggest heroes.”
She Couldn’t Bear Spending A Cent On These Horrible People
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“My significant other’s father was a lawyer, and he always said his favorite story was of this old money lady he knew of. She was worth around $15 million and had five kids, one of whom married a horrible man, who would spout just the foulest crap against anyone that wasn’t a white, rich, able-bodied, Christian male. When she died each child got $3 million, except for the crapbaby’s wife. She donated that money to things like HBCU’s, Planned Parenthood, the Special Olympics, her local synagogue, food banks because ‘you both deserve to die penniless and hating each other for being awful human beings.'”
His Last Words Were Filled With Hate Towards This Person
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“I remember reading about a fellow who wrote ‘And to (person X) I leave 50 cents, with which he should buy a good, stout rope to hang himself with, and thus rid the world of his wretched existence.'”
These Parents Had Some Strict Rules On Who Their Daughters Could Marry
“I used to be a paralegal. I wrote up a trust for a couple who left an allocated amount of money to cover the wedding of each of their three daughters, with some very specific guidelines:
The girl had to get married in the church the parents got married in. She had to be marrying a ‘white Christian, who has been male since birth.’ Prior to the marriage, they had to complete a reading list of 10 books on finance and relationships. They also both had to be college graduates, without loans.
I felt like a jerk typing that crap up.
There was a bunch of other weird crap in that trust, but that’s the part I remember most clearly.”
This Family Secret Was Out Of The Bag After This Scandalous Tape
“Readings aren’t typical with wills, those are mostly a Hollywood thing. Still, sometimes the will specifies a reading, usually (at least I’ve found) when the deceased wants to insult someone in front of the rest of the family.
The strangest, and most embarrassing, reading was in a room crowded with relatives when a man who died fairly young (massive heart attack, in his early 50s) left everything to his 26-year-old step-daughter, which was quite a lot of money and property. Two ex-wives and children from the first marriage got nothing, nor did siblings, nieces, nephews, etc. The will specified that a DVD be played to explain why the step-daughter was getting everything. Like everyone else, I thought it’d be the guy explaining the big insult to the rest of the family.
What followed was completely unexpected.