Estate Planning, Probate & Elder Law Attorneys

» Duty to File ALL Wills?

Section 6-1(a) of the Illinois Probate Act requires that "[i]mmediately upon the death of the testator any person who has the testator's will in his possession shall file it with the clerk of the court of the proper county...." It's a felony (under section 6-1(b)) to "wilfully alter[] or destroy[] a will without the direction of the testator or wilfully secrete[] it for the period of 30 days after the death of the testator is known to him."

One question that recently arose in one of the Illinois State Bar Association's e-mail discussion groups is this: If you have a number of Wills of a deceased testator in your possession, must you file ALL of these Wills with the clerk of the court of the proper county? Or, if you believe that the most recent Will is valid and revokes all prior Wills, may you just file this most recent Will?

I am of the belief that you must file ALL Wills of a deceased testator, although you can obviously seek to have admitted to probate only the most recent one. The statute discusses "the testator's will," but doesn't define that term. Certain attorneys have suggested that they have the ability to decide which of the testator's Wills is THE testator's Will, and to file only that Will. I disagree on this point -- I think that a probate judge is the only person who can decide which Will (if any) is valid, and since filing comes before this determination, individuals in the possession of a decedent's Wills (whether attorneys or not) must file all Wills.

I will agree that the Illinois Probate Act could be clearer on this point -- a simple change to the statute would do it (maybe a reference to "any original will of the testator"?).

Note that confusion can also be avoided if the testator destroys his or her prior Will whenever he or she executes a new Will.

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» Podcast #1 Notes

Podcast #1 is up and running -- see below.

Here's the plan with respect to future podcasts:

#2: Wills
#3: Living Trusts
#4: Health Directives
#5: The Estate Tax
#6: Simple Gifting
#7: Not-so-simple Gifting
#8: Probate Basics
#9: Trust Administration
#10: Probate and Trust Litigation

I'm new to this, so comments are much appreciated. Am I talking too loudly? Too softly? Too quickly? Just let me know, and I'll try to correct it on future podcasts.

The opening and closing music is "Musette," by the French composer Felix Le Couppey (1811-1887).

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» Housing Price Statistics

Almost three years ago -- soon after I started writing this blog -- I posted about how real estate sales statistics tend to shed more heat than light. Here's that post.

This still happens in a down market, like the one we have now. Each Sunday, in a feature called Price Pulse, The Chicago Tribune real estate section runs the numbers for a different area of Chicago. This week the focus was West Cook County and DuPage County, using figures from August - October 2007 (and the same period in 2006). The "results" are shown in a half-page color map.

My biggest complaint about Price Pulse is that its focus is on increase/decrease in value, and not on the effect of a good or bad market on the number of houses sold. While Price Pulse includes total units sold, the emphasis is on whether there was an increase or decrease. That's not particularly helpful, especially in municipalities where few houses are sold. (For instance, in Wayne, Illinois, the median price of houses sold went from $720,000 in Aug. - Oct. 2006 to $466,00 in Aug. - Oct. 2007. Given that only 5 houses were sold in the '06 period, and only 2 were sold in the '07 period, are these figures at all meaningful?)

Here's a quicker way to quantify what's going on in an area's real estate market, one that takes into account median price and number of houses sold. Basically, it just involves multiplying these numbers together, as you would for a company that sells widgets or spark plugs. You can then quantify the drop in "gross sales." For instance,...

I live in Oak Park. From Aug. - Oct. 2006, 348 homes were sold in Oak Park, with a median price of $310,000. From Aug. - Oct. 2007, the median price actually increased -- to $310,750 -- but the number of homes sold dropped to 272. Is it at all accurate to think that the Oak Park real estate market went up, based on the small increase in median price? I don't think so. Rather, I'd show the Oak Park market by doing the following calculations:

Aug. - Oct. 2006: 348 x 310,000 = $107.88 million in gross sales

Aug. - Oct. 2007: 272 x 310,750 = $84.524 million in gross sales

That's a decrease of about 22%, which is a number that makes sense to me. Overall, the "big" municipalities (which I define as municipalities with sales of 100 or more units in Aug. - Oct. 2006 and in Aug. - Oct. 2007) in West Cook and DuPage saw a decrease in gross sales of 23.50%. Berwyn had the highest decrease (57.84%).