My wife recently inherited a house from her grandmother about 6 months ago, or so she thought. Her grandmother went to her lawyer about a year ago to change her will to make my wife the executrix of the will, leaving her everything. She purposely left her own son, a drug addict, out of the will because "she had provided for him previously in life" (paraphrased from the will). After her death, we had to evict the drug addict son, and eventually moved in. We have since done several thousand dollars worth of renovations on the house. Recently, we received the taxes for the new year only to find out that the taxes are in the drug addict son's name. Upon further investigation on the registry of deeds website, we found a notification with the following info:
Year: 1990
Price: $0
Type of deed: Quitclaim
Grantor: Grandmother
Grantees: Grandmother and Drug addict Son
This is all the information I know about the deed right now. I have a few questions that I'm hoping someone could help me with.
Does this quitclaim deed somehow negate my wife inheriting the house, thus, making the drug addict son the real owner of the house?
Is this some sort of malpractice by the lawyer? Isn't this something that should be researched before writing a will, such as a title search?
If the son is a full or part owner of the house, is there any way to get his name off of the deed?
Would there be any way to recuperate the expenses for the our renovations if the son tries to sell the house?
Thanks
Ownership of house through inheritance
Back in 1990, when the deed was executed and recorded, to the extent that the deed was validly executed, the son apparently took ownership of all or part of the house. If the deed created tenants in common without rights of survivorship, then it is possible that the son only owns some fraction of the house. However, if the house went through probate and was transferred to your wife, then there are title issues that she needs to resolve. I would talk to a real estate attorney in your neck of the woods and ask her to look over all of the relevant paperwork. I can't give you any meaningful information without doing the same.
There was not necessarily any malpractice involved in this matter. If the will states that your wife was to inherit all of the estate, that means all of the probate estate. In other words, she was entitled to inherit all probate assets. A house that was transferred to a joint tenant with rights of survivorship is not a probate estate. It belongs to the surviving tenant upon the death of the other tenant. If the deed created tenants in common without rights of survivorship, then the portion of the house retained by the grandmother would have been a probate asset inheritable by your wife. Talk to a lawyer.
Can we be sued?
Thank you for the response. I did some further research on the deed. It is a deed with "quitclaim covenants" where the grandmother has a "life estate". I now believe that the drug addict father is the full owner of the house. My new question is, can he sue us for evicting him out of his own house? Or would he sue the lawyer? Our lawyer went to court for us to evict the parents, giving us the impression that we fully owned the house. It's bad enough that the dying wishes of an old women were denied due to an incompitant lawyer, but if we can now be sued because of this, even with no intentional wrongdoing on our part, I will have lost faith in this country's legal system. Time and time again, the legal system has shown me that crime, in fact, DOES pay.
Can you be sued?
Wow. That is a very strange situation. I would love to offer some guidance, but there is just too much I do not know. What a crazy story. The best advice I can give you now is to talk to an attorney. Honestly, I know you are not very high on attorneys right now, but you should get some help undoing what went on WITHOUT exposing yourself to further liability.