Sometimes I think it helps to remember that other people's lives are super weird, too. Like you just never know.

Case in point: a friend of mine, who is half-Chinese, half-Caucasian, was raised by his mother and had only minimal contact with his dad, who fucked off to China sometime shortly after my friend was born. In my friend's late teens (i.e., about 20 years ago,) he was informed by some relatives in China that his dad had died, and that was the last time he heard from them. Life goes on.

But now, out of the blue, an aunt in China has reached out to let my friend know that when his dad died, he actually left my friend 25% of an apartment in Shanghai. (This is the first he's heard of being included in his father's will at all.) The aunt and another relative also each own 25% of this apartment, and the final 25% is owned by the dad's new wife, who has continued living in the apartment for the last 20 years. The relatives want to sell, the new wife doesn't, and the aunt has reached out to my friend to get him on board so they can vote her out.

And he's kind of torn about the whole thing--all else being equal, he could definitely use the money. But it also feels like he's being used as a pawn to force a widow out of her home. He's been assured by the aunt (whom he barely knows) that the wife (whom he didn't know about at all) was not, in fact, the love of his dad's life, just a last-minute, super-age-inappropriate fling--she's basically the same age as my friend, so widow-ness aside, she's not a decrepit old lady, and has no children to support or anything like that.

And it's not like he can just refuse to deal with it forever. At some point, the apartment will have to sell, so why not get the proceeds now when he could really use them? But then there's all the insane paperwork to deal with over international borders.

Anyway, windfall or not, I'm glad no one has reached out to me to announce I'm the secret inheritor of overseas property. Also, you should never leave property to multiple people in a will. Figure out some other equitable divide for your assets, or else stipulate that the house will be sold and only the proceeds will be split. But having multiple names on a deed is a massive hassle, even if the people named don't want anything to do with the house or its proceeds.