*Sitting By The Fire Waiting For Bimbo Clause

["Let Inga Tell You", La Jolla Light, published December 16, 2010] © 2010

While most folks are happily counting down the arrival of Santa Claus, I’m eagerly awaiting Bimbo Clause.  

As I told Olof, I trust him implicitly.  Whom I don’t trust is the bimbo who marries him after my untimely death.  Such has been the level of discussion that she is now officially referred to by both us and our estate attorney as The Bimbo.  And in our impending estate documents, she has her very own Clause.

Olof tries to maintain that it could just as easily be The Pool Guy who will cash in if he goes first.  But there is no mention of The Pool Guy in our wills.

When the kids (who came from my first marriage but whom Olof feels a certain proprietary ownership of since he paid for most of their college educations) were of age, we decided we needed to update our standard A-B trust document. 

Frankly, there is no such thing as an A-B Trust that will make me happy.  There are supposed to be safeguards you can put in there, like locking up the A Trust, to make sure The Bimbo doesn’t roll in and steal the estate from the kids. But there are too many ways around it, especially if The Bimbo wants to gut the estate even before the Bimbee dies.   I don’t so much want to lock up the A trust as lock up Olof. 

We know of several cases right here in sunny La Jawla where The Bimbo (or her evil twin, the Bimbo Caretaker) has appropriated substantial portions of the estate even before the decedent crumped. Our estate lawyer said there really isn’t much you can do about that, assuming the geezer, er, pre-decedent, is more or less compos mentis.  And besides, he asks, don’t you want Olof to be happy?

“Define happy,” I said.   

It might sound like I do not trust Olof not to do something insanely stupid after I’m dead.  And that would be true.  But it isn’t personal to Olof.  Would that guys of a certain age of which Olof is fast approaching weren’t prone to start thinking exclusively with the little head.

Our estate lawyer said he’d never met someone who had so little trust in trusts.  “Can’t you have a little faith?” he said.

Not. A. Chance.  As one might guess, I have personal parental experience with bimbo home invasions.  To this day The Bimbo is dining off my mother’s Limoges, which I am now secretly hoping contains lead.

The problem with putting too many legal constraints on Olof is that he is far too nice to mention that my standard of living and that of the kids, never mind our  level of happiness, has been exponentially improved since I married him fifteen years ago.  He’s just the kindest, funniest and most generous guy on the planet. The kids adore him.   Given that an influx of cash from him upgraded this house from abject squalor, it seems a tad unfair telling him who can live in it after my premature passing.  But this hasn’t kept me from telling him anyway.

When I divorced in 1983, I gave my former husband every asset of the marriage plus took out a second mortgage to buy him out of our La Jolla home.  As a long term strategy, it was terrific.  How could La Jolla real estate ever lose value?  (OK, don’t answer that.) In the shorter term, I was perpetually destitute.  I used to lie awake nights formulating plans A-M, with A being to take in roommates and M being to sell my body on the street.  Problem was, I didn’t think I’d get much for it.

 I have lost years of my life expectancy just hanging on to this little house and The Bimbo is simply not going to get it.  

So, yes, I do want Olof to be happy.  If he is dating some minimally attractive menopausal troll over sixty with an estate of her own and no desire to remarry, he can be as happy as he wants. 

Let no one say I’m unreasonable.