One relative who named me as executor gave me a slightly larger percentage of a financial asset that had named beneficiaries. This kept it out of the will so less obvious to all the other heirs. Of course, doing it this way didn’t preclude me from charging a fee (which I did not), but is one way to address this.
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New question on this topic for those who have been executors. How did you distribute money to heirs? I need to close estate account and need to send money to 6 different people, several out of state. I figure the bank could tell me the best way, but curious if people mailed checks or wired money or what. Five figure checks.
Checks, ACH, and one wire, when the heir offered to pay the wire fee.
ACH to all. And don’t be in a hurry to close that account…it will take time, but sooner or later the deceased name will pop up on an abandoned property list, and having the account to manage the cash will make it MUCH easier to deal with. Most of the assets will be small (a fractional share of IBM worth $12) but if there are outstanding tax refunds (I managed to get an old IRS refund check that had never been cashed reissued…each heir got several thousand dollars) having a checking account makes it super easy.
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Mail. Nobody had problems. I would have preferred something electronic (zelle, ach) but it was a group who struggled with a lot of this as it was. I did an earler distribution so that everyone had the lion’s share of their funds but maintained the account with a lower balance for an extra year to handle any stragglers – in or out - as @blossom suggests.
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We got some money via checks, some via electronic transfers. It all went fine! For distributions of my parents’ estate we all got checks that we all deposited.
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I was the executor and sole heir for my mom. I kept an estate account open for a year after she died on the advice of our estate lawyer.
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My friend just told me about an older family friend she & her H visited often. On one visit, the H asked them a question about a bill he had received. One of his four kids, a lawyer, had taken over bill payment, so the parents weren’t paying attention to the bills they received. For some reason, the father had looked at a statement. That led to my friend looking into things further and realizing that the son had bought a vehicle for himself in the father’s name, with the father also paying for the payments & insurance. She called one of the siblings, and the bottom line was that they found out the brother had misappropriated a million dollars from his parents. Holy cow!
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@kelsmom - based on my own life experiences, this sadly does not surprise me one bit.
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Hopefully this won’t be issue. My uncle died Sept of last year and was in skilled nursing after several years of assisted living so no property to dispose of ant this point. I handled his finances when anlive ans POA. Estate is just one bank account since investments all had beneficiaries or TOD. But it is a great deal of cash.
The POA terminates upon death. Did he leave a will, naming you are executor or personal representatave?
does your state have a small estate exemption to probate? (In CA it’s $160k+.)
I realize that. That was to say I was very familiar with his finances. I am the executor and have now waited the required time past posting of notices and have courts permission to distribute. Small estate exemption in SC is only 25k but wouldn’t have met criteria of small in CA either. Again lots of cash and a random annuity left to ‘estate’. At this point I am just curious if people put checks for large sums in mail or used another way.
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I liked ACH for everyone because when I sent the email “your distribution is on its way”, I could ignore the subsequent whining “mine is late” (no it’s not, you need to check your bank balance) or “I’m going away next week, can you forward my check to my hotel?” (no) or “I need to send some money to my son who needs to go to Vegas for a little vacation, can you split up the check?” (hell no).
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Another data point; We got checks. 6 figures if that helps. In a way, it was simpler since they didn’t need our bank info for ACH or wire.
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I wouldn’t want to be the executor chasing down a missing 6 figure check if the UPS is slow delivering an envelope. There’s enough paperwork to deal with without adding to it. I would not send 100K through the mail. It takes less than three minutes to look up your bank’s numbers on the website and email the info to the executor. And if the money doesn’t arrive when it’s supposed to, there is a digital trail, and it’s the bank’s responsibility to figure out what went wrong, not the executor’s.
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I took just the opposite tack. Sent the largest checks (low six figures) snail mail. USPS has a 90-95% delivery accuracy within 3 days, so my job as Trustee was solely to get the checks into the mail. If they took a week (or more) for delivery, not my problem. If they got lost – they didn’t – I could always just cancel payment and mail another check. (Not the Trustee’s responsibility to trace lost mail in the USPS.)
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My sibling used Fed Ex to send a large check to someone. The rest of us were local so we picked them up.
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We get mail 3 - 4 days a week now, so I check informed delivery every day. Apparently one day it was stolen, never received it. It contained a few bills, replacement credit cards (and one was used, had to cancel and reorder) and my sin’s paycheck (he just got a replacement through fedex, unfortunately it’s the wrong one). I have zero faith in the usps.
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I sent a large for me check to one of my kids recently.
Sent it priority mail. Got to its destination but not in the time frame advertised. Sat at a sorting facility for a few days. It got there and it was nice to have that tracking number.
I guess that I would prefer something electronic. It wasn’t possible for what I needed to do and the post office did get it there.
Found out from the bank that cashier checks can’t have a stopped payment on them for 30 days.
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We had a nice lunch together and my brother, who was personal rep of my parents estate handed us all checks. I took the check of my sister who was at work and drove it over to her house that night. The checks were all mid-6 figures.
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