INHERITANCE: “BONDS AWAY!”

OCTOBER 16, 2023 – Ironically, I had only myself to blame for the expense of having to drill into UB’s safe deposit box at the local bank. The key to the box had magically surfaced in the course of my very first encounter with UB’s office of the “beautiful mind.” I’d put the key with its tag aside but forgotten it. I would never find it again, despite an exhaustive search.

Tom Sullivan accompanied me to witness the drilling event and to take careful inventory of the safe deposit box contents: a stock certificate for 1,000 shares of a utility stock issued by a company so old, it had to be traced through four acquisitions for us to determine its DOD[1] value: enough to cover Tom’s fees over the years that he’d provided invaluable aid and counsel. And there were a few gold coins that UB had committed to safekeeping during the same period of mental calm when he’d seen fit to protect the stock certificate—though without the sense to have it converted to his broker’s street name and added to UB’s main brokerage account. Given his financial savviness—the Grand Giveaway to Alex excepted—I suspected that UB had forgotten all about the safe deposit box.

If only disposition of the rest of UB’s estate had been so simple as paying the bank to hire a guy with a drill wielding a bit the size of my middle finger. It would take me the next five years to be done with matters, large and small. The latter included the $7,500 of U.S. Savings Bonds that I’d uncovered early on in my clandestine operations inside UB’s office of the “beautiful mind.” Nearly all had been purchased by Grandpa around Christmas of each year from the mid-1950s onward. Most were for Gaga’s benefit and had matured years before UB died.

I spent no less than $2,500 worth of my own time trying to redeem the bonds. After looking up the accrued interest on the Fed’s website and assembling a neat spreadsheet containing the bond issue dates, numbers, face amounts, interest calculations, original beneficiary, and proper probate disposition, I proceeded to the main Wells Fargo Bank center near my office in downtown Minneapolis.

Over the years I’d established a first-name basis business relationship with several of the private bankers in the retail office. When I presented a sampling of the bonds, the bankers—all born abroad around the time of Cory and Byron, if not before—looked at the engraved certificates as if they were on loan from a rare museum collection. The lead banker dutifully called “legal” to establish what additional documentation was required. I was pleased that the files I had in hand—labeled, “PR APPOINTMENT” and “UB DEATH CERT.”—yielded the necessary items. The bankers then happily accommodated my request, deposited the redemption proceeds directly into the UB Estate account I’d established earlier, and issued me a receipt. I thanked the cheerful bankers profusely and mentioned that I had “many more bonds where those came from,” to which they  invited me without hesitation to bring them in for redemption. Any of the bankers would be more than willing to assist.

Later that day, during a break in my legal work, I collected the remainder of the bonds and hiked back down the street to the bank. When I entered the office of the lead banker who’d so graciously helped out that morning, he jumped from his chair, closed the door and looked at me as if some calamity had befallen him. “Mr. Eric,” he said, “we have a big problem.” I was baffled by his alarm.

“We could lose our jobs over those bonds,” he said. “We found out we’re not supposed to redeem those bonds in the way we did. Our supervisor said we will probably receive only a reprimand, maybe probation, but we can’t redeem any more without being fired.”

After spending another $2,500 worth of my personal time (based on my hourly billing rate for legal services), including long calls to the Fed, which, ironically, had its main Minneapolis district offices three blocks from my office in the opposite direction from Wells Fargo, I was able to establish the proper protocols for redemption of bonds held by Gaga—having been deceased for nearly a quarter of a century—without anyone at Wells Fargo being fired, going to jail, or being subpoenaed by a Senate Select Committee chaired by Elizabeth Warren. The only catch was that the full amount of the deposit would have to be reported to the IRS under my social security number (not the tax ID numbers of Gaga or UB’s estate)—adding to the accounting costs and migraines of squaring matters up at tax reporting time. I tried to explain all the convolutions to my sisters when I made distributions to them, but I suspect my emails went straight to their “junk” folders.

If only UB had “taken care of business,” I thought, pursuant to his duty as executor of my grandparents’ estates. But I was long past harboring any bitterness over such a minor inconvenience amidst the larger scheme of life. “Look at it as a few extra brushstrokes,” I rationalized to myself, “to the story you’ll someday write.”

Of far greater consequence than Grandpa’s “Christmas” bonds was the check I had to issue to the New Jersey Department of Revenue after Tom Sullivan had sent me the final inheritance tax return for review. In the moment I signed the check, I sympathized with Grandpa’s strong Republican affiliations. Yet after entering the figure in QuickBooks and recovering from a severe choking episode, I saw matters in the cool light of day.

Our monetary inheritance was found money. None of my sisters or I had earned it; except in the nominal sense of my administrative efforts, none of us had worked for a dime of our inheritance. If under the capitalist scheme a macro-economically productive incentive could be established between sweat and smarts on the one hand, and the prospect of financial remuneration on the other, no such relationship existed in the case of “found money” which is what our inheritance was. Moreover, in furtherance of a just and equal society in which the accumulation of wealth as the driver of disparity creates eventual injustice and unequal power, I decided an inheritance tax, especially one imposed on indirect heirs, was eminently just and reasonable.

My conclusion regarding taxes served as a balm on my lingering anger over the million-plus dollars that UB had wired to London, and for that matter, his destructive neglect of the Rutherford properties. Would my angst be the same, I asked myself rhetorically, if UB had been a wholly “normal” individual who had spent his wealth on “normal” excess consumption—expensive wines, cars, beach condos, foreign travel? Would any of us be scandalized if he’d married and reared a family of four—who would be our matching cousins—and sent them all to fancy boarding schools and Ivy League colleges? Yes, there was the matter of Mother’s inheritance, which she never received, but just as UB’s wealth was for him to squander, so was Mother’s share for her to give away as her troubled mind deemed fit—well, to a point; in any event, who among us was prepared to demand disgorgement by the Episcopal church or other charities to whom Mother had been inclined to bless with her bipolar largesse?

Contentment, I realized, was to be found in whatever fruit plopped into our picnic basket while my sisters and I were snoozing next to it in the bucolic countryside surrounding our inheritance . . . were it a cottage mean and a single cherry tree or un grand château with acres of orchards.

But these water-calming considerations—encouraged initially by early advancements in plans for the Rutherford properties—would be disturbed by unfavorable conditions; a wholesale change in “climate,” as it were, that would drive Cliff and me in equal portions to the breaking point.

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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson

[1] Date of death—UB.