Plan To Be 100

In the process of probate administration, there are certain “allowances” that are paid “off the top” before creditors and beneficiaries get what they have coming.   Among those is the exempt property allowance.  The exempt property allowance is currently $15,000.  It goes to the surviving spouse, but if there is no spouse surviving, it is divided among the surviving children.  Since 2000, it has gone to adult surviving children as well as minor children.

In 2015, the Michigan Court of Appeals issued a published opinion in the case of In Re Estate of Shelby Jean Jajuga (click on the name to read the case). Ms. Jajuga died leaving a will and one surviving child.  The will did not leave anything to the child, and expressly stated that the child should “inherit nothing.”  Notwithstanding this expression, the child made a claim for the exempt property allowance and it was granted.  The Court of Appeals concluded that this was ok, and affirmed what I think most practicing probate lawyers believed the law to be, which is that the child gets the allowance regardless of what the will says.

That result did not sit well with some people, and so legislation was introduced to change the outcome. That legislation recently became law.  Specifically, the change is in the language of MCL 700.2404(4).  Click on the statute to read it.

Because the outcome of Jajuga neither surprised nor offended me, I am not a fan of the fix. But as far as fixes go, I think this one is better than it might have been.  Notably, the way the change is written, it does not eliminate the exemption for children, nor limit it to minor children; but rather the exemption remains as it existed, but can be barred by language in a will expressly cutting out the child or children or by simply eliminating their right to an allowance.

Two observations:

When planning for small estates, lawyers may want to disable the exemption so that the exempt property allowance to a child or children does not significantly alter the resulting distribution where non-children (including descendants of deceased children) are takers. Of course this can perhaps be better addressed by simply defining beneficial interests to include an offset for any allowance received.  The risk of routinely disabling this allowance in wills is that in very small or insolvent estates, doing so would elevate creditors above children.

My second point relates to Medicaid estate recovery. In cases where assets mistakenly end up in probate for a decedent who received long term care Medicaid benefits, the exempt property allowance comes before the State of Michigan gets repaid for their estate recovery claim.  The way the fix is written, this remains true.  This will allow children in these cases to continue to have good reason to open the estate, and place them in a better bargaining position with the State with respect to settling estate recovery claims.