Tuesday, February 25, 2014

Questions about family and property and Infernal Revenue etc

Maybe somebody else knows.

When I start digging around in "family law" I get swamped. What I’m looking for is family law (probably common law as opposed to statutory) regarding non-nuclear families; in particular mutual support in a single home of brothers and sisters.

You’d think precedents would be easy to find for extended family households: they've been around for longer than countries have. I’m thinking of mutual dependency based on sharing the same household and pooling the incomes. Adam and Becky are married with daughter Cindy and they share the house with Becky’s sister Denise and her son Eustace. Together they pool the incomes of Adam and Denise for infrastructure and emergency support, though some of the money stays nuclear.

In google and the law help sites I find lots of stuff about divorce, and the latest fashionable topics, but so far no sign of what I’m looking for. Domestic partnership laws are new, and aren't designed for the kind of layered authority and responsibility the situation demands.

There are options, of course, if you can squeeze into one of the state’s categories. The state wants to define everything in terms of individuals or corporations, fragmenting things as fine as possible for best definition and control. And then to prevent one kind of abuse they change the rules around willy-nilly.

There’s the non-stock non-profit corporation: a nice simple form. You need a registered agent and three directors, and the last time I was involved in one, the directors had to have different addresses. Ummm....

This is probably as simple as tying your shoes (though do you remember how long it took to teach the kids that?), but unless you know the right jargon google is not your friend. And if I sit down with a lawyer’s meter running I don’t want to waste time figuring out what I’m talking about.

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