Who Gets Your Parents Home: A Guide to Peaceful Inheritance

​Before I start, sorry for your loss, I'm sure your parents were awesome, good people. After all, they wouldn't leave you a house if they weren't responsible, hardworking folks.

Now that they are gone, their house will go to their heirs. The children are usually the heirs. Unless the deceased willed their home to someone else, like a Church or some charitable institution the children will inherit.

​Estate Tax
Whenever a house passes to new owners, there will be an estate tax to be paid. The estate tax is sort of like a fee that will be paid to the government for the privilege of peaceful transfer of the property of the deceased to the children.

Ideally, the children will have some spare cash lying around to pay for the estate tax. If not they may face the tragic situation of having to sell the property to the pay the estate tax and get the monetary value of the rest. So it is best to have some money saved away in the event you have to pay Estate tax.

Who Inherits? 
If there is a multiplicity of heirs, the general rule is that they will all inherit in equal shares. But if the inheritance is a house, it is usually a bad idea to subdivide the property. If the heirs do nothing, they will end up owning shares of the property, but no one person will own the house.

This is difficult because they will be in co-ownership any decisions they need to be made respecting the property needs to be approved by all of them, or it won't happen.

Extra-Judicial Settlement
Instead of co-owning the house it might be better to make a settlement that will allow one person to own the home in return for financial consideration to the other heirs.

If you go down this route, then one person will own the property, but the others get fair value for what should have been their share of the property. This makes things more straightforward, and since the heirs are probably related anyway, they can agree on acceptable terms like installment payments.

Whoever gets the property should probably get new insurance in their name since insurance is sometimes not transferable.

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