I lost my mom on February 14th. It really sucks. I was always very close to my parents. When we lost my dad in 2003, at least I still had my mom. Even though I’m married with a daughter, I’ve never felt so alone. In 1992, my parents made out their wills making me the Executor. My older brother has always been a lazy, useless POS and even then they knew they couldn’t trust him to be the Executor. He has worked a couple of months in the past 20 years (literally) and will go on binge drunks for weeks at a time. I even had to call the cops on him last year because he was my mom’s caretaker and spent about a week drunk. He still lives in the house and we are having to cover the expenses until it can be sold once everything is done, which in TN could be up to a year.
The estate is about $650k to be evenly split between he and I and has to go through probate. I spoke to a lawyer last week and she said a lot of people do it without the assistance of a lawyer. Has anyone ever done it yourself without a lawyer? And does anyone who has been an Executor have any ‘lessons learned’ from their experience?
Thanks
Sorry for your loss. I recently was the executor for my father's estate, it was out of state (Kansas) so I used an attorney. My advice with an estate that large (650k) I would use and attorney, beginning to end it cost us less than 3k. I didn't even go to court, the attorney did it all. I did have a good idea of all the assets as I was the conservator prior to my father's death, so creating a list of assets for the courts and a financial accounting was easy. I also elected to use an CPA to do the final taxes (1040 and 1041) so if there were problems my brothers couldn't accuse me of anything. I also elected to not make any disbursements at all until the final taxes were done and well passed. Beginning to end it was a year and a half, some of the reason it took so long is he passed in July and we didn't do his taxes until the following March.
A pretty good article from AARP on filing taxes
How to File Income Tax for a Deceased Taxpayer (aarp.org)
My condolences on your loss, Stanford.
I have been in a very similar situation and would be happy to tell you what I’ve learned, however would rather not share too much on the public side of the forum. Please send a personal message if you’d like to discuss.
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