Court Opinion

ID: 9571237
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 20:30:05.815253+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T12:26:27.032689
License: Public Domain

Judge Phillips
dissenting.
In my opinion Judge Walker correctly found and based his judgment upon the following:
A trust which provides only for the payment of income to the surviving spouse with the right to invade the corpus limited to the discretion of the trustee and granting no power of appointment to the surviving spouse cannot be compared with or equated to the value of the unrestricted ownership of a one-third share of the estate of the deceased, considering the intent and purpose of G.S. 30-1.
The intent and purpose of G.S. 30-1, as I read it, is to give the surviving spouse the option of taking an intestate share unless *493a substantially equal share is devised by the will. The statute does not permit a testator to restrict his spouse to what he wants her to have and subject to the control of a trustee. Mrs. Finch prefers to control her own money and in my view the statute gives her the right to do so.