Deceased transfer of stock - good plan for us?

[soninokla]

I checked with my dad's tax person today. She said to go ahead and get the stocks transferred from my mom's name to me and my sister's names. So looks likes it's a go if I can get all the paperwork done. Thank you to everyone for their input.

[disneysteve]

I checked with my dad's tax person today. She said to go ahead and get the stocks transferred from my mom's name to me and my sister's names. So looks likes it's a go if I can get all the paperwork done. Thank you to everyone for their input.

Did she say what your tax basis would be?

[soninokla]

Did she say what your tax basis would be?

Thank you disneysteve for your replies. She said it's based on the value of the stocks at the time of my mother's death in 1998. From what I can tell the AT&T stocks are worth just a little less now.

Yesterday in the old shoebox with the AT&T stock certificates that were purchased in 1962 I found some Lucent and Southwestern Bell stock certificates. I think these came from splits/spinoffs. I went to the AT&T investor site and got a complete list of splits/spinoffs so will try to figure that all out today.

I'm beginning to realize the reason my father never wanted to mess with these stocks is because he's 82 and always saw the stock market as "funny money" and not a real asset.

[soninokla]

Just replying so I can put email notification on this thread. Thank you everyone for your assistance. I tried going through the list of AT&T stock splits/spinoffs to compare to the stocks I've tracked down and it didn't match, not even close. So I'm in way over my head so going to pay my dad's accountant to figure it all out. Thanks again.

[BigRule]

Hello,

I have to say, I am totally blown away after reading your thread. I am dealing with the EXACT same situation. My grandfather passed away and my grandmother is not doing well. The crazy thing is he owns the SAME stocks you do partly from the split offs/mergers, etc.

I am curious to know how everything turned out for you. Any details you could give would be greatly appreciated. I recently found out my grandfather has approx. 1500 shares in AT&T and my grandmother was completely unaware of this as dividends have been reinvested automatically. Either that or she wasn't aware of the actual balance of the portfolio. I am meeting with a lawyer this week to try to do my best to straighten out the estate since the farm has been in our family for over 100 years.

[soninokla]

BigRule,

I finally got the stocks transferred to my sister and myself. We sold before the stocks dropped quite a bit. I haven't filed taxes yet so I'm not sure, but I think we sold for a slight loss from the tax basis price, which should offset some income I think.

One mistake I made was getting my father's tax accountant involved to help figure out what stocks we should have had, based on all of the stock splits, mergers, etc. though the decades. She charged us $900 for her time to do that. It turns out that her research didn't help at all in getting the stocks transferred.

The biggest problem was Computershare. I had to go through them to get the stocks transferred. I went in circles for months with them. They would tell me to send in a certain form. Then after waiting would get something in the mail that had nothing to do with what I needed. It was so blatently apparent that they were not even trying to help me. Finally after months of going in circles when I called them I told that I wanted to talk to a supervisor immediately and that I was getting tired of being jerked around.

When I did talk to the supervisor she told me to send in certain forms. I told her I did that months ago, that I was tired of getting jerked around and that I wanted to talk to her supervisor immediately. That FINALLY got the ball rolling again. If you have to deal with Computershare I hope you have better customer support than I got.

John