Edit: The properties are in different stars than we live in. Washington and Arizona
Here's the story.
My wife and I are finishing up our last years of college and we have a newborn baby. My wife's dad died this week. He wasn't the type of man to have things organized and made a lot of shady business deals. At the time of death he owned four not-so-great properties in a few states. One is an empty lot. Two are cheap modular homes (one of which is in very bad condition) and the fourth one is a lot of land with two modular homes on it (the homes do not have a foundation underneath them, which I heard will make it unsellable?)
My wife is already on the deeds for these properties so she won't be inheriting them, but now makes her responsible for them?
The properties have renters on them, but they are mostly shady people who I don't really want to deal with.
We originally planned to keep the properties and collect the rent money. But now we are finding out that lots of money is owed in property taxes, utility bills, repairs, etc. We have no money and the rent payments would barely help.
We are also afraid that there are other debts that we might have to be responsible for, and that all this will affect my wife's credit, since the properties are in her name on the deed.
Another question, I know that many debts are paid by the estate. What would be the estate in this situation, since the property wasn't solely owned by my wife's dad?
I personally want to just sell all the property because they are extremely far from where we live, and I don't have the patience to deal with the mess he left us. I don't really care about the money from rent since it seems to be more hassle and upfront cost than we have and want to deal with.
I told my wife that she isn't responsible to paying back the utility bills, which weren't in her name, but the property is, but she seems like she think she has to pay everyone back. The renters also seem to be taking advantage of her and saying that she has to pay all these things too.
We are already paying for the funeral stuff and have no money.
What should we do? What are some laws I should know?
Submitted June 29, 2017 at 01:39PM by mjlavalleejr http://ift.tt/2tqrepV
