Probate may go fairly easy with not much in probate, but I very much dislike our Probate Judge - he is not even an attorney but depends on staff attorneys. He was appointed many years ago and seems to politically be able to hold onto his position.
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You know, you don’t HAVE to have a funeral. The state will pay for final expenses but then you have no say in what the final arrangements are. I know in Colorado if you are on medicaid, cremation is covered by medicaid (because they asked me that when I was calling around to find a place).
In my father’s case, my mother paid for the cremation and the funeral costs, which we kept to a minimum. My mother actually loved it all so much she said she wanted hers to be just the same - same church here, same flowers, same holy cards, same burial. My parents were long time members of the church here, so the funeral mass just required a donation to the priest and the organist. They were both buried (4 years apart) at my father’s family plot in Massachusetts. My mother’s cousin worked for the town for a billion years so he paid (with an employee’s discount, I’m sure) the fee for the burial and the cost to have their names etched onto the stone (which has been there for more than 100 years). For my mother, I paid for most of the costs. You can’t stiff the funeral home as they won’t do the services if you don’t pay. But we didn’t do a funeral home, just a church service here and a cemetery service in their old hometown.
My father didn’t care about anyone, so certainly didn’t care if credit cards were paid. He was a jerk. My mother didn’t owe any debts like that. She did have a car titled to her but we were able to transfer it with a POA (my sister), the death certificate, and some other document my sister had to get. The DMV looked at the documents, looked at my sister’s ID, my ID, said “All last names are the same?” We nodded, he made the transfer.
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This thread has been informative. It’s also made me look closer at some things. Hopefully it is beneficial to others too. I have some work to do regarding assets now.
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A person can also pre-pay funeral expenses. My father has pre-paid his. BTW - medicaid did not consider his pre-paid funeral expenses as an asset.
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She had joint accounts with me structured as JTWROS, and they still wouldn’t do anything until I opened an EIN for her.
Googling tells me this JTWROS account is excluded from an estate and so they shouldn’t have asked for an EIN?
Indeed that is what happened with my dad. He had deeded his house to my sister, and had titled his car over to our nephew (we all agreed these were good things to do, dad discussed this with the rest of us). He had a very small joint checking account with one sister that became hers. And that was it.
He had a few outstanding medical bills, and a nice letter to each with his death certificate and a letter explaining he had left no assets…and the debts disappeared. We had a lawyer in place just in case there were any questions.
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My dad had a few outstanding bills, but no assets. The small joint account he had with my sister was used to pay for death certificates (which didn’t cost much). He had prepaid his funeral and gravestone and gravesite.
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Depends on the state, as the above is not correct for California. In CA, the Personal Representative/Executor’s job is to file the death cert with the County*, which is the public announcement that Mary Doe has died and if any creditors think Mary owed them money, they can come forward now by notifying the Executor. They have 120 days to do so, in writing. Not all estates need to go to probate in CA.
This quote below about as simple an explanation as is necessary. Note, no way the IRS is gonna waive any unpaid taxes if the estate gave away all the assets via PoD/ToD, and then claims it is broke. (That just defies common sense, and if it was legal, everyone would do it.)
“In the event that the owner of a POD account dies with unpaid debts and taxes, their POD account may be subject to claims by creditors and the government.”
Payable on Death (POD) Account Benefits and Drawbacks.
*the county will charge a fee to record teh death cert, so someone will need some cash.
btw: credit card companies know that they are last in line to get paid, and will usually be willing to negotiate a haircut to get paid sooner rather than later. By law, once the account owner dies, interest compounding stops, so Executors have no rush to pay credit card companies.
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But you are assuming there is a personal representative/executor for every death. Those are appointed by the probate court. If you don’t file probate, there is no personal representative.
That’s how it was for both parents. No probate was filed. No posting in the newspaper, no notice to creditors, no where for them to file a claim. He had no property titled to him. ALL his debt was unsecured. No one had to file a tax return as he had no income that year. I kept his phone on for a few weeks and if someone called, I told them he had died, and the creditors said sorry, but they knew no one was going to pay. USAA actually said “You and your mother have no obligation on this debt.” Correct.
No one is going to come and say ‘Child, you are the executor and you MUST do all these things.’ I don’t have any obligation to file a tax return for him, and in fact I have no power to sign a return for him/his estate as I wasn’t the executor. Who would the IRS come after for not filing a return?
i think most on CC are going to be somewhere between paupers and Warren Buffett. This thread may help people get things in order for their kids/spouse to make the clean up easier. My only titled asset should be my car. My bank and retirement accounts should pass directly to them. I really doubt they’ll have to probate anything and I know they don’t want any of my stuff, even my fabulous fabric collection.
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My DiL mom died with a will, but no money and many outstanding debts. There was a very small PODbank account and a small pension for which DiL was beneficiary. She was not the executor. The executor also did not have much in the way of funds. So DiL took this small amount and used it to pay the lawyer retainer, the fee for the death certificates, and the outstanding bills for the utilities for the house, so those could be shut off. We paid for most of the burial costs so the body could be released from the morgue and sent to the prepurchase plot, which required a plane flight. (DiL eventually reimbursed us for that from proceeds from the house sale). The executor could not pay those and the only asset in the estate was the house itself.No cash. And everyone wants to be paid upfront. The bank holding the mortgage was antsy about getting paid, but the lawyer convinced them it was best to wait since repossessing the house was going to make them responsible for clearing it out.
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It’s all very interesting. It seems like, for most people, taking care of most things with a PoD or ToD agreement is a smart move, perhaps smarter than putting it in a will and subjecting it to probate. For assets that aren’t able to be transferred that way there are other protections that can be implemented.
Everyone should probably consult a lawyer when making these types of decisions. It obviously varies by state.
My in-laws didn’t/don’t (MIL is still living) have a huge “estate”. There is no will. Everything is transferring PoD or via a trust (condo). There is no executor named. My wife’s financial POA will dissolve on her mother’s death. She should have no obligations. Any creditors, there shouldn’t really be any besides perhaps a few small monthly bills, aren’t going to have anything to go after and if they do the legal expenses involved would more than offset any benefits they might receive.
As POA, my wife will have to file taxes for her mother and include her father that passed away this spring. Eventually when her mother passes away she won’t be under any obligation to file taxes for her. Perhaps it will make sense if her mother would be due a refund. I guess when the time comes well figure that out.
I was younger when my parents passed away. They didn’t have.much besides a mobile home, a car, a small insurance policy and a small bank account. When my father passed after.myothet, his SS was being used to pay for his nursing home care. No one ever “came for” anything else.
I just recently put PoD beneficiaries on my bank accounts (hadn’t realized that was a thing). I’ve had beneficiaries and have updated them in life insurance, retirement and investment accounts. I should go to the.motor vehicle administration and put ToD paperwork on my vehicles soon. The real estate will be the next thing I need to tackle. Some of that hopefully will be sold and or transferred in the next year or so. Our home needs to be set up in some way though. I’ll have to look into that more.
This is correct. As I mentioned upthread, my dad had an enormous amount of credit card (among other) debt and no assets. I contacted the creditors and informed them of this fact and none chose to force probate (if they chose to do so, they would have to put up the money for the fees as twoinanddone said).
My dad was a teacher for 40 years in NY and collected a state pension. NY apparently pays its teacher pensions one month ahead. He had just received his monthly pension payment 4 days before he passed. The state of NY, under the leadership of its attorney general, decided to threaten to sue my sister and I for the back payment of the month that he died in (plus interest, because they are extra slimy in Albany). The AG’s minions spent two years doing everything from threatening to lien my sister’s farm (she lives in NY) to sweeping her bank accounts (I’m outside NY, so they couldn’t do much to me). Additionally, my sister and I never had any legal authority to access his bank accounts, which only had a small amount of cash in them anyway.
Over a two-year period, I repeatedly provided all of the legal documentation and state and federal laws that protect heirs from deceased debt that they aren’t co-signors to. Finally, in a last-ditch effort, I sent a binder with all of the threatening correspondence from the minions as well as the supporting legal documentation via certified mail, directly to the AG herself, with a letter saying that she didn’t back off, I would be hiring an attorney and suing for harassment. That worked. We got a letter releasing us from the matter. But how many people are they doing this to who just pay??? I will do a happy dance on the day that she is voted out of office. What a sham!
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Certainly a consideration when one retires if they want to remain in a state like described.
Social security is paid in the month following earning it, so paid in October for September. Trick is you have to live through the entire month to get paid for it; if you die on Sept 29, you do not get paid for Sept. If it is deposited in Oct, and the bank doesn’t reject it, SSA will require it to be returned. If there was a POD, the bank or SSA will come for the refund to whoever took it. (ask me how I know!)
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Yep. My father died December 31. He was not entitled to the check deposited in January, and it needed to be returned. Which it was.
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My mother died early in the month, and her Social Security payment had been issued late each month. My siblings and I were then entitled to her pro rata Social Security payment. I had to fill out some form including my siblings’ addresses and Social Security numbers, but we each received a several hundred dollar payment from SSA. The payments were reported as 1099 income to each of the beneficiaries. The process went smoothly–much more so than some other activities.
I believe Social Security payment dates are a function of the recipient’s birthdate.
Now the NYS pension…They clawed back the payment, as they should have, but then they clawed it back second time. That was real hassle to resolve.
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My mom died on Nov 1st (All Saint’s Day). SS was fine!
Dad started drawing SS at age 62, and he died 2 days before he turned 64. We got mom on the phone with SS, and they made the changes for her to receive the bump up in payments; this was in 1995 where a lot was done via phone with SS.
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It is paid on the second Wednesday for birthdays 1-10, third for 11-20, and fourth for 21-31. But it is for the month before. You received your mother’s for the month before sometime in the month she died.
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I had no problem with NYS wanting the pension money back, however neither my sister nor myself had legal access to my father’s bank accounts. Moreover, there were numerous creditors with claims to the roughly $3,000 that he had in there - so NYS would have had to get in line with the others.
My problem was with two years of lawsuit threats from the NYS attorney general. This was a retirement benefit payment - not anything that my sister and I were co-signors on or beneficiaries of. The tactics of the attorney general were egregious and illegal. Suppose we never knew our father and all of a sudden we’re receiving lawsuit threats for collection on death debts for a man we never knew? Additionally, the attorney general could have compelled that the estate be probated at any time if she doubted that there were no funds available.
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One does wonder about the rub between politics and following the law or how far the law can be stretched. The people who have to live with the tactics of the attorney general who is supposed to act in a legal manner. Families having to deal with these situations. One has to study what is going on and how to best deal with it, which my hat is off to you for properly ending the charade and bullying.
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