Quote Originally Posted by Tybee View Post
It's too bad we all saw King Lear, or read Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres, for the Iowa farm version. I'm not a big fan of trusts after seeing one in play in my mom's estate.
I loved Jane Smiley, I was a big fan decades ago and I haven’t thought about her in years. I liked her very first novel, long before she won the Pulitzer prize. I met her over the copy machine in the library where I worked. A Thousand Acres was decent, but Moo is her novel I like best. It is so funny, and so true to life about the territorial fights between the agriculture and the horticulture departments at mythical Moo U.

DH lived that life on that very college campus, being a student in both agriculture and horticulture departments. I had an autographed copy of Moo but I released it into the wild when I got rid of books years ago.

Why don’t you like trusts? We have a trust, DH and I. The idea is that it avoids probate. and the estate’s assets can be dispensed of more quickly without dragging it through public courts.

My in-laws had a trust and that seemed to work just fine. The current farm problem, as I see it has nothing to do with how the assets were structured.