I’ve written several times lately on disinheritance and more benign alternatives to disinheritance.
There is definitely a trend afoot toward greater disinheritance. I’ve noticed this trend in comments from colleagues on our estate planning attorney online forums. I’ve noticed the trend among my own clients. And there is a recent article here pointing out a great disparity between what elderly baby boomers plan to give to their children, and what those younger generations expect to receive as an inheritance.
There can be a number of causes for this trend, but i expect in many cases there is a desire on the part of parents to #DisinheritWoke. In some cases it is estrangement for other reasons, but in a lot of cases there is this aspect of wokeness in the wayward child. In other words, a prodigality or waste of money and/or values.
I have suggested in other posts that rather than completely disinherit the child (disinheriting with silence on the reason why may be the only safe alternative in California if the sore point is some kind of PC wokeness that may be protected as a matter of public policy), you may find more flexibility with trusts sitused in free states that can be used to incentivize moral conduct.
But there are other options that you could try right here in California.
For example, the Fatted Calf Trust!
This is simply a specific gift of a significant (but not huge) dollar amount to a general needs trust drafted with very specific, targeted values-based incentive provisions designed to eliminate estrangement and welcome the wayward child back into the fold. You still want to be careful about implicating reasons against public policy for the disinheritance but you can be a little more aggressive with the smaller amount.
The parable stops here. The prodigal son just gets the fatted calf and a minimum wage job, not the inheritance he already spent.
But you could go further and couple this with a limited testamentary power of appointment in favor of surviving spouse to allocate some additional inheritance to this child later upon remediation. Or if both parents remain alive, the plan can be restated.
