<p>Why not a family vacation with some of the proceeds? Would that make your mother happy?</p>
<p>bclintonk has made an observation regarding taxes which I believe is correct. The executor’s fee is earned (taxable) income. There’s another alternative (in my state, at least, and I assume in yours as well) which is to take a fee in the amount you believe is appropriate for your efforts, but less than what is set by statute. I’m a firm believer that people should be paid for their work - it makes me nervous when they aren’t for a lot of reasons. So maybe you should estimate the time you’ve put into the administration of the estate, pick what you feel is a reasonable hourly fee, and accept that amount for your services.</p>
<p>Had it happen in my family. My mother deliberately made my husband the executor, rather than one of us. He is an attorney and did a ton of work. Sold a condo, sold a store/business plus everything else involved with being an executor. (Did the closings for them & all the legal work.) He took no fee. It’s family. We had enough hard feelings without adding to them.</p>
<p>I am co-executor with my brother so that won’t be an issue. We will either both take the fee or not, depending on tax implications.</p>
<p>On the other hand, I will be the executor for a couple who never had children and I am their “daughter.” I am sure this is going to cause resentment among various nieces and nephews. Especially since I am the primary heir. </p>
<p>I will take my fee. I have spent countless hours shlepping them to appointments, meeting with physicians, doing whatever it takes to keep them in their home. They chose me for a reason, they left their estate for a reason, and I am NOT going to feel guilty.</p>
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<p>I have a feeling that many siblings in this situation feel there were plenty of ways and times over the course of a whole lifetime that they may have gone the extra mile for their parents. And didn’t charge them for it.</p>
<p>SodiumFree, first let me express my condolences on the loss of your mom. I’m sorry. It’s always difficult to lose a parent, and now you’ve lost both of them, so please accept my sympathies.</p>
<p>As for the executor’s fee: I do think bclintonk may be right about the taxes, so be careful, especially if you decide to take the fee for yourself, then split it, since that puts you in the position of paying taxes on money you didn’t even keep. </p>
<p>When I acted as executor for my mother’s estate, I spent a lot of time dealing with the various tasks, but I waived the fee. I was named executor because my mother and I lived in the same state, while my sibling lived far away. I would have taken on the task because it was right, and because it was the only practical thing to do. I did not know about the fee in advance, so I’ll bet neither my mother nor my sibling knew about it in advance. Most people don’t deal with surprises very well, particularly when feelings may still be raw from the loss of your mom.</p>
<p>I understand what kluge is saying about getting paid for work, and that is a valid argument. However, dealing with splitting an estate (and particularly with sentimental belongings) after a painful loss is difficult for all the siblings. You’re not just handling an estate, you’re dealing with people’s childhood feelings. There is no money that’s worth jeopardizing the bond between family members.</p>
<p>^^^^^roshke-totally agree with your take on this.</p>
<p>Executors get a fee??? </p>
<p>My parents have named me executor. Promises to be a nightmare, as the only assets are three properties: the house my parents live in, the condo that my grandmother lived in, and the house my sister and her family live in one of them. Two of the three have mortgages equalling a significant portion of market value. Very little savings (I would be surprised if it were in the five figures), no mutual funds except a small IRA.</p>
<p>Expect it reasonably likely that Medicaid will come into the picture at some point, and our state has Medicaid asset recovery. Not sure how to deal with the house issue; my parents want the estate to own the house my sister lives in and have her keep making payments to the estate. Seems to me like the estate would never close on that path. Keeping the sister in the house is likely to equal far more than her 1/5 share of assets, and my other sibs are also in crummy financial straits.</p>
<p>I am probably going to forfeit my 1/5 share; will give it to said sis for her help to my parents or divvy it among my parents’ grandchildren (though two grandkids have died, and one of my sibs has no children, so that gets tricky, too).</p>
<p>Said sister is only a mile from Mom and Dad and helps out on a daily basis, but has also gotten a lot of financial support from my parents over the years where others have gotten none. </p>
<p>This is not going to be fun. They have an attorney updating their will (last time it was done was 1979) and I have a lot of questions. I want them to have a plan for how they want me to deal with all of this.</p>
<p>There’s no avoiding hard feelings if the people involved are so inclined. When I see the things that lead to people not being on speaking terms I’m reminded of the old joke about faculty infighting in University departments: “The fights are so vicious because there’s so little at stake.”</p>
<p>Maybe it’s because as a lawyer it’s my job to do the kind of things that executors do, and I expect to get paid for it, but if someone is going to be mad at you for getting paid to do work that has to be done so they can receive money they didn’t work for… well, I say that’s their problem.</p>
<p>I agree with the feelings behind roshke’s post. But when you’re the executor, you’re not doing it for your mother, even though you may feel this. You’re acting on behalf of the beneficiaries, i.e. your siblings. If you don’t have a great relationship with them, you have to tread very carefully. If you don’t have a wonderful relationship with their spouses, tread carefully and have some aspirin handy. If you do have a terrific relationship with them (which, thank God, I did), tread carefully because it’s too precious to endanger.</p>
<p>My question is: if $20K is too much, how much is the right amount? Can you take that amount, and leave the rest in the estate?</p>
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<p>I don’t disagree with you very often, kluge. In fact, I can’t remember doing so, until this thread. Nevertheless, I do disagree with this. If estates were just money, they wouldn’t be such a source of angst. Estates are rarely just about money.</p>
<p>hayden, Same principle, really. While one sibling may do more today, another may do more tomorrow. That’s how things are supposed to work in families, anyway.</p>
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I agree but I view this differently when it’s a family member as opposed to an independent third party like a lawyer. Sometimes family members will do things, like take care of mom and dad, because they want to and feel that they should, without receiving monetary compensation to do it whether offered or entitled to it or not. It might not ‘feel right’ as the OP has indicated and therefore it’s a reasonable decision to not take the compensation.</p>
<p>roshke, you’re right, and I do agree with you.</p>
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I agree with that. Only the money part is about money. But handling other people’s money - specifically - is something people should be paid for. I am particularly uneasy about giving people the responsibility for handling other people’s money and not paying them for that job. I think most of us have taken on the responsibility of taking care of one or more of our parents and in-laws in a manner which is not “equal” to what some other family member has undertaken. There are frequently bad feelings about that, too. But handling an estate is a specific administrative task. It’s business. And since it’s business, and involves handing money, I think it’s a good thing to pay the person who is given that job. </p>
<p>Otherwise, you just have the recurring situation where the greediest and most unreasonable people are continually rewarded. (Which, incidentally, is what I see in this thread. Worry that people - who should recognize that the executor is doing a job for them and should be paid for it - will be mad that the executor didn’t work for them for free. An executor isn’t working for the deceased, he or she is working for the heirs.) Chances are, it won’t be the person who spent the most time taking care of old Dad who gets their nose out of joint, it’ll be the self-centered one whose primary interest in the deceased has been how much they were going to get from the estate all along. Spending too much time worrying that folks like that will be mad at you isn’t being caring; it’s just masochism.</p>
<p>Besides, they’ll be mad at you anyway, for some BS issue like who gets the punchbowl or something. That’s where the long knives really come out. :)</p>
<p>You do make good points, kluge. The problem with your comments is that the executor’s fee usually comes as a surprise. I wouldn’t see a problem with it if everyone knew in advance that the executor would receive a fee; and if that fee were somehow linked to actual cost of labor. However, if I understood the OP’s situation, she didn’t know about the fee until she had taken on the job, and the fee is 20K to each executor, regardless of how much work is invested.</p>
<p>This was the identical situation I had - I had no idea that a family member received a fee for serving, and the fee was a flat amount (unless changed by the executor), regardless of how well or how badly I performed the task. As a lawyer, you tell your clients up front what you’ll cost, right?</p>
<p>Surprise is the biggest single cause of problems in relationships, personal or business. In our industry, we have a cardinal rule: Thou shalt not surprise a client. At least when it comes to costing them money.</p>
<p>OP here. Thanks so much, everyone, for your comments! They have been very helpful to me in clarifying my thoughts and feelings about this difficult decision. </p>
<p>To answer some questions and provide more information: </p>
<pre><code>- A number of posters have talked about my reimbursing myself for out-of-pocket expenses, but fortunately, that is not really an issue. My mother had a money market account with check-writing privileges. My co-executor and I were able to easily convert that to an estate account, from which I paid estate expenses (for example, monthly maintenance fees and property taxes on my mothers condo, before we sold it). Although that reduced the size of the estate available to be distributed, I am positive that my siblings and nephews have no problem with that.
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bclintock (and also kluge and hayden) are correct about the tax implications of my taking the fee and splitting it with my siblings and nephews, versus just leaving the $20K in the estate. If I take the fee with the intent of splitting it with the others, I will have to pay income taxes on the total amount, while the amount I share with the others would be gifts to them that they would not have to pay taxes on. So if I do decide to not take that $20K for myself, but instead share it with my siblings & nephews, I would just leave it in the estate, to be divided equally as part of the inheritance. (It will be subject to NJ estate taxes, but that will be less than the personal income tax I would have to pay.)
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somemom had a number of questions in post #6. Somemom, the attorney did not do that much more than I did; its possible I did more than he did. Which is a problem of its own – I anticipate that my brother will argue that my co-executor should not receive an executors fee at all! But thats a whole other issue. Yes, its $20k to the attorney and $20k to me. The accountant told me that the $40k total executor fee is 6% of the estate. I have not done the math to figure out how much I would get and how much my siblings would get if I were to take the $20K fee, but my gut feeling is that the difference would be significant enough that I would worry about it.
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<p>All the comments both those in favor of my taking the fee and those against were very helpful to me, in that they expressed so clearly the pros and cons that have been floating through my mind, and brought some much-needed clarification to my fuzzy thinking on this issue, with all its practical and emotional aspects. And some posters roshke especially made points that I had not really focused on.</p>
<p>At this point, I think I am leaning toward not taking the fee. As many of you noted, there is the possibility of strained relationships. In my case, I am lucky that the people involved are, as zoosermom pointed out, (very!) reasonable, nice people. But I would still worry that they would be upset, even if only on a subconscious level. And I would hate that, because these people are all very important to me, in part because we have lost not only both our parents, but two other brothers as well, who both died around the age of 50 way too young. </p>
<p>Many of your comments resonated with me, but the one I will quote is haydens: “If you don’t have a great relationship with them, you have to tread very carefully. If you don’t have a wonderful relationship with their spouses, tread carefully and have some aspirin handy. If you do have a terrific relationship with them (which, thank God, I did), tread carefully because it’s too precious to endanger.” I am lucky to also have a terrific relationship with these people, and I agree I dont want to risk losing that; it is too precious.</p>
<p>I do want to say, though, that those of you that argued in favor of my taking the fee made very good points, and that I understand my husbands view that I should take the fee. With two kids in college (well, one is on a medical leave, but I hope he will be returning to college), we could certainly use it. I know my husband would agree with Youdontsay, who said Im sure youre downplaying the work and worry of having been executor. I did not keep track of my time, but I do see that I have 173 gmail threads (not just individual emails) with the trust and estate label in my gmail account. Not sure if thats a lot or not, really, but I know my husband would consider it evidence that I did work hard on this.</p>
<p>In the end, I think that my brother and sister will probably suggest that I take part of the fee maybe something like $2000? That would be fine with me. </p>
<p>I will keep you up to date on how this all works out. Thanks again for all your comments!</p>
<p>Adding to the mix: Some siblings are offended by the fact that they were not chosen to be executor because it looks like mom/dad thinks one is more competent than the others. That alone is an impetus for bad feelings that should factor into the mix.</p>
<p>Good luck to you, OP.</p>
<p>My father died in the summer of 2010. I took care of probating the estate. I filled out all of the forms, tracked down all of the information, etc. I would NOT consider accepting money for having done so. No attorney has been involved. I also help her with her financial affairs on an ongoing basis, as does my H, who did her taxes, for example.</p>
<p>My mother did offer to let H and I use some of the large amount of frequent flier miles she and my father accumulated, and which she had no plans to use. We gratefully accepted. We didn’t tell my sister, who has done virtually nothing to help with all of this stuff, because I feared that she would act as if we were taking advantage. She is inclined to extreme sibling rivalry.</p>