Accidental death leaves rival girlfriends bickering over a reported $45 million fortune while the star’s parents have to provide for his granddaughter.
While it takes most people a lifetime to accumulate an estate complicated enough to require professional assistance, celebrities and other younger millionaires are still vulnerable to accidents.
Paul Walker, for example, was barely 40 years old when the Porsche he was in rammed a tree at 100 miles per hour.
The crash was both accidental and fatal. His fans grieved, but his family now apparently has to juggle their mourning with the burden of keeping his Hollywood fortune together.
Every millionaire needs an estate plan
Reports that the “Fast & The Furious” star died with $45 million to show for a career that started in childhood and ended up generating over 40 feature film roles.
As usual, it’s unclear where that number comes from, but since his asking price per project jumped to $7 million in 2009 he definitely had the earning power to make that kind of estate at least theoretically possible.
Raised Mormon and never married, Walker was famously unpretentious and could well have invested a lot more of his millions than his contemporaries with flashy lifestyles and high alimony bills.
His extravagances seem limited to charity work, tourism, a couple of California houses, some fast cars and his 15-year-old daughter.
That’s where his estate gets complicated.
Meadow’s mother Rebecca McBrain is reportedly back in the picture looking to regain custody and a share of the family assets.
While Meadow moved in with Walker a few years ago, Rebecca did raise the girl on her own until 2011, presumably with some kind of financial support arrangement.
Unless there’s a hidden story behind the custody change, she probably has a pretty strong claim there – not many family courts would take a teenager girl away from her birth mother without extenuating circumstances.
Meadow may eventually inherit everything. But for now, she’s still a minor and will need support for the next few years.
Meanwhile, formal “next of kin” inheritance rights appear to have reverted to Walker’s parents, which indicates that he probably died without even a legitimate will.
If he’d had an estate plan, it would almost certainly have taken the time to spell out custody and inheritance without creating controversies for grieving family to sort out.
Domestic partners get no respect
And the tabloids are pondering whether that process of sorting out the dead man’s affairs will leave his more recent long-time girlfriend squeezed out of his legacy.
Supposedly Jasmine Pilchard-Gosnell, who had been with Walker for seven years but never married him, resents the idea of being passed over in favor of his parents.
This sort of thing happens all the time when young single millionaires die and the process cuts even the most responsible and emotionally committed “significant others” out of the picture.
Formalizing the relationship brings legal status. Leaving it nebulous can backfire when something goes wrong.
All unmarried people who truly care about their domestic partners need to carve out a role for the survivors in their estates – whether in the will, direct assignment of beneficiary status or a combination of the two.
Power of attorney is also a nice idea, as endless same-sex couples have learned over the years.
Of all of these measures, beneficiary assignments are ironically the point many advisors have to hammer on, often without results.
Younger clients in particular tend to write in their parents when they sign up for retirement accounts or employer-sponsored life insurance, simply because at the time they don’t have any closer relationships they’d rather trust with the money.
But by the time they meet someone, the beneficiary forms have long since been forgotten. Many simply assume that the live-in girlfriend or boyfriend gets preferential treatment automatically.
The reality is that the legal system doesn’t know what’s in your unmarried clients’ hearts and so the informal “spouse” can end up cut out of the estate and even locked out of the house and the bank accounts.
Hard to say whether that’s what’s going on between Paul Walker’s girlfriend and parents. We don’t know what their relationship was like when he was alive.
For better or worse, neither do the courts.
Never carpool with your advisor
In theory, Walker’s financial advisor could produce the paperwork it takes to provide definitive answers to all these questions.
Unfortunately, that advisor happened to be Roger Wilson Rodas, the performance auto fan turned Merrill Lynch rep who was driving the Porsche and died with Walker in the crash.
While the idea of advisor and client dying together is horrifying, there is little evidence that Rodas would have been able to help the Walkers resolve the estate.
Rodas spent most of his adult life in wirehouse environments, so it’s likely he would have passed more advanced planning points up the corporate ladder.
And at two years younger than Walker, he was probably not thinking of estate planning issues when he worked with his famous friend.
While he might have eventually suggested a trust for Meadow and some kind of formal financial arrangement for Jasmine, it’s likely that there wasn’t much urgency.
Walker was extremely healthy and only 40 years old. And Meadow will be 18 in a few years, so the risk of anything upsetting her guardianship must have looked vanishingly slight.
The gamble evidently didn’t pay off. Now, while both advisor and client are dead, you and your clients are alive.
If they aren’t as young as Walker, they likely have children or protégés who are. Ask if their estate plans are in place.
