Estate planning humor for you. This joke is originally from a Michigan probate attorney’s blog. Mrs. Jones, the 5th grade teacher, posed the following problem to one of her arithmetic classes: “A wealthy man dies and leaves ten million dollars. In his estate plan, one-sixth is to go to his wife, one-fifth is to go to his son, one-fourth to his butler, and the rest to charity. Now, what does each get?” After a very long silence in the classroom, Johnny raised his hand. With complete sincerity in his voice, Little Johnny answered, “An estate planing lawyer!”
Here is another estate planning joke from the same source. When Dan found out he was going to inherit a fortune when his sickly father died, he decided he needed a woman to enjoy it with. So, one evening he went to a singles bar where he spotted the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Her natural beauty took his breath away. “I may look like just an ordinary man,” he said to her, “but in just a few months, my father will die, and I’ll inherit 20 million dollars.” Impressed, the woman went home with him that evening and, three days later, she became his stepmother. Women are so much better at estate planning than men.
This is not exactly an estate planning story, but just as relevant to this discussion. The author of the Mississippi Fiduciary blog shared a story about a Latent Cerebral Recovery (LCR) device developed in China. Here is an excerpt of that post. A New England Journal of Medicine article reports today that a new device, developed by Hungsing Labs in China, is capable of decoding brain cell activity after a person dies. In over two hundred clinical tests conducted on individuals only moments after pronounced dead, scientists were able to ‘ask the deceased’ several questions related to their name, family, and other personal information, and decode the information after stimulating cells deep within the cerebral cortex. Estate planning lawyers see the tests as encouraging. “Over 50% of Americans die intestate,” says William Wrighter, JD, of Oak Grove, IL. “Imagine being able to execute a will even after someone was previously thought dead. It could open up a completely new area of estate planning law.” The blog post ends with an author’s comment: “to read the full story, don’t click anything. Just take note of today’s date and smile.”
Estate planning and probate are serious topics. We don’t mean to make light of any situations; however, our office does like to have some fun. We hope you enjoyed our estate planning humor. Contact Howard Stross at (813)852-6500 if you have any estate planning or probate questions.
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