Where there's a Will there's a JOW #1231

We just got around to updating our wills this week, which got me thinking about the whole subject of estate planning, and wills in general.  Actually, I don’t need a will.  Nobody does.  It’s your heirs that need a will to divvy up the stuff you have no further need of.  Here are a few jokes about wills and estate planning for the inevitable day they will be needed.

 

You know things are bad when the specialist your doctor recommends for you is an estate planner.

 

A rich man’s included the following proviso: ‘To my loyal estate planning attorney, I leave my children a complicated series of trusts that will generate huge legal fees.’

 

A 5th-grade math teacher poses the following problem to one of her classes:  

“A wealthy man dies and leaves 10 million dollars. One-fifth is to go to his wife, one-fifth to his son, one-sixth to his butler, and the rest to charity. Now, what does each get?”

After a very long period of silence in the classroom, one brave little boy raises his hand. And with complete sincerity, he said, “A lawyer!”

 

For poet Heinrich Heine, he vowed to give all his property to his widowed wife on one condition: she needed to remarry. While this might sound like a romantic way to encourage your widow to move on, it was far from it: his wife was known to be boring and incredibly vain. Heine actually stated that if she remarried “There will be at least one man who will regret my death.”

 

After my father passed away the priest told me that he would not get into heaven because greed had consumed his life.  But he told me that if I donated my inheritance to the church, the church could probably work something out.

 

An attorney gathers an entire family for the reading of their grandfather’s will. Relatives came from near and far to see if they were included, and they sat patiently as the lawyer somberly opened the will and began to read: 

“To my cousin Ed, I leave my ranch. 

To my brother Jim, I leave my money market accounts. 

To my neighbor and good friend, Fred, I leave my stocks. 

And to my cousin George, who always sat around and never did anything but wanted to be remembered in my will, I say, ‘Hi, George.’”

 

One day a man hears that a distant uncle passed away. He's a little sad, but only a little, for they barely knew each other. Then, a few days later, a package arrives. It contains his inheritance from the estate: A violin and a painting. He has no idea what to do with them. After pondering the matter, he takes them to an appraiser. Not too long later the appraiser calls him: "I've finished my analysis, and I've got some good news. There's no doubt at all that what you have is a genuine Van Gogh and a genuine Stradivarius."

The man is ecstatic: "I can sell these for millions!"

The appraiser says "Well, you can sell them, and they'll fetch some money for their novelty value. But not millions. You see, the truth is, Stradivarius wasn't much of a painter... and Van Gogh made lousy violins."

 

A young man asked an old rich man how he made his money.  The old guy fingered his vest and said, “Well, son, it was 1932. The depth of the Great Depression. I was down to my last nickel. “I invested that nickel in an apple. I spent the entire day polishing the apple and, at the end of the day, I sold the apple for ten cents.  The next morning, I invested those ten cents in two apples. I spent the entire day polishing them and sold them at 5:00 pm for 20 cents. I continued this system and after a month I’d accumulated $1.37.”

” And that’s how you built an empire?” the boy asked.

“Heavens no!” the man replied. “Then my wife’s father died and left us two million dollars.”

And finally, a cautionary tale.

Roger was very thin because he was afraid to spend a lot of money on food. He looked forward to the day when his grandfather would die and leave him a fortune.

His grandfather was blessed with both a sense of humor and a sense of justice. So he planned that when he finally died all he would leave to Roger was a cookie.
But what a cookie!
It was made with butter, churned from milk from a yak milked by a virginal milkmaid on the highest field on a hidden Himalayan peak next to the ultimate source of the sacred Ganges River.
It was made with flour harvested from plants of the single-grained Einkorn found growing on the site of a Neolithic Anatolian village and ground between millstones of Lapus Lazuli.
It was made from eggs collected from Peahen nests in the remotest marshes of outback Australia.
It was made from sugar boiled from a cane garden in a secret valley in New Guinea.
It was flavored with a vanilla pod from the mysterious and still sacred original Vanilla Vine found by the Totonac people when they arrived in the Mazatlán Valley on the Gulf Coast of Mexico in the 15th century.
It had added flavor, as well, with chocolate chips made from the beans of a Cacao tree found on the site of a previously undiscovered Mayan temple.
When Roger's grandfather died, the cookie was baked by Gordon Ramsey in a kitchen built exclusively for the purpose.
It was the most expensive cookie ever baked and its ingredients consumed the entire fortune.
The lawyers delivered the cookie to the anorexic Roger as his entire inheritance. Understandably, all the other relatives were more than a little put out and they paid Roger a visit.
They all wanted their share of the fortune, but they couldn't find it because it had disappeared into the thin heir.