All Forum Posts by: Mariah Jeffery

I am in the process of evicting a tenant and just got a notice from the power company that the power was switched into my name. This is almost surely because the tenant didn't pay. Can I shut off the power since the tenant agree to pay? This is is South Dakota and he has two young kids. He has refused to answer the door when the process server went to serve him the Summons.

The owner of the company is a Realtor, but she is mostly retired and her daughter is the one who handled the garage rent. It was 6 months of rent that they owed me. I strongly suspect this happened last summer; I was told by my father in law at that time the garage was rented and when I asked about it, the rent started showing up on the next month's statement.

I had asked them to rent the garage. They are managing 4 homes for me and there are 2 garages in between the homes. They apparently just decided to pocket the garage rent and claim it wasn't rented. I will look into filing a complaint with the DRE.

I called them with the tenant on the line and all of a sudden "Oh, yeah. It is rented! The computer had a glitch and we didn't pay you. Oops! Sorry. We won't even charge you a management fee on that money."

I have a property with two garages on it. I found out one of the garages is rented because my father in law was there and saw the tenant coming out of it. He asked how long he has been there and what he is paying. He is paying $45 per month rent since April, and this has not shown up on our statement. My father in law walked into the property management company and asked about it. They looked him straight in the eye and said that no one is renting the garage. I'm in complete shock. Should I take legal action?

No, she's not on her death bed. She is planning marriage to a much younger man in 2013 and even though she plans on a pre-nup, she's not taking any chances. She has decided she wants to either gift my husband at least a 51% majority of her shares in the corporation or put them into a trust for him, to ensure that it stays in the family after her death.

For those of you with lots of property, are you holding it in a trust? What type of estate plan do you have set up?

I'm asking because my husband and I are about to inherit some property from his mom (shares of a corporation which holds ranch land) and we'd like to know
1) How she can get the shares to us with minimal/no tax consequences (should it be put in a trust or should she simply gift shares to us)?
2) How can we hold this property so that our assets will be protected?

I'm confused on gift limits. Can MIL exceed the $13K per person limit if she dips into her liftetime exclusion, which is $5M this year and set to revert to $1M in 2013?

We do plan to involve a lawyer and CPA, but I'm trying to do preliminary research so I go into the meeting focused and educated.

I don't, but I have enough properties now that I don't necessarily add to the reserve fund for every new property I buy. Basically I'm pooling the risk.

A friend of mine just suggested MIL set up a trust to put my husband in control of the property and make him the owner when she dies. He claims she can include up to $1M in the trust and this would effectively "gift" all of the shares to him now, without tax consequences or having to set the basis arbitrarily low. Does this sound right?

The land is already leased to a cattle rancher and we definitely have no plans to change this or the tax status any time soon.