Excerpt from: The Global Mail (click for full article)
Parents are living longer. The 85-and-over age group is the fastest growing in Australia, and more have dementia. They are staying at home longer, dependent on family care for extended periods.
There are more children from those big, post-war families to wrangle over decisions: who is the primary carer, who has financial control, who is mismanaging Mum’s money, who isn’t pulling their weight ...
And a parent’s death doesn’t end the fighting; the value of the parental home has increased so dramatically over the decades that more siblings consider it worthwhile going to court over the estate, destroying whatever skerrick of good will may have survived.
“Thirty or 40 years ago, it was a huge thing to dispute a will, and only the rich did it,” says Rodney Lewis, a specialist lawyer and author of Elder Law in Australia. “With increasing wealth we’ve become more litigious and this is one of the areas it’s manifest.”
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