Named executor of a will: what you agreed to (US)

If you have been named executor of someone's will, you are now legally responsible for finding everything they owned, paying what they owed out of the estate, and handing out what is left the way the will says. It is real legal work, mostly in a fixed order, and most estates take many months from start to finish, not weeks.

This is for someone named executor of a will in the United States, doing it for the first time. It cannot tell you your state's exact rules, your county probate court's deadlines, or whether you need to hire an attorney, so where this disagrees with the clerk's office or a lawyer, go with them.

An example: a fairly ordinary estate

Say your father named you executor. (This is an example, not a case.) He left a house with a small mortgage, two bank accounts, an old 401(k) from a job he left years ago, and a life insurance policy the family knew almost nothing about. The will is in his filing cabinet, and it names your sister as the backup if you cannot do it.

In the first week you order more certified death certificates than feels necessary, take the will to the probate court in the county where he lived, and go through twelve months of his bank statements looking for accounts and policies nobody mentioned. Nothing gets paid out yet. That comes later, once the estate has its own bank account and its own tax ID.

What the job involves, in order

Six stages, and you cannot skip ahead to the last one.

1. Find

   Locate and secure everything: the house, accounts, pensions, policies, and anything else of value.

2. Value

   Value the estate as of the date of death, which often needs a professional valuation for property or a business.

3. Apply

   Petition the probate court in the county where they lived for authority to act. What it issues is usually called letters testamentary, the document banks ask to see.

4. Settle

   Pay debts and taxes before anyone inherits anything, including the estate's own income tax return if it earns income.

5. Distribute

   Distribute what remains according to the will, once the creditor claim window has closed.

6. Account

   Keep records of all of it. Beneficiaries are entitled to see the accounting.

Your first week, if you decide to act

Do these before anything else, and in roughly this order.

1. Get certified copies of the death certificate, more than seems necessary. Banks, the pension administrator, and the DMV will each want their own.
2. Find the original will, not a photocopy, and take it to the probate court in the county where they lived.
3. Apply for an estate EIN from the IRS. The online application is free and takes minutes, and most banks will not open an estate account without one.
4. Once you have letters testamentary and the EIN, open a bank account in the estate's name. Every estate expense and every estate payment runs through it, and nothing else does.
5. Keep estate money and your own money separate from day one. Paying an estate bill from your own account, or the reverse, is the fastest way to create a mess an accountant has to untangle later.
6. Ask the probate court clerk how long creditors have to file a claim against the estate where you are. That window has to close before you distribute anything.

How long it really takes

A simple estate, one house, a couple of accounts, one beneficiary, still takes many months. Add real property that needs to sell, a business, assets in another state, or beneficiaries who disagree, and two years is not unusual.

The slow parts are not the tasks themselves. Waiting for the court to issue letters, waiting for a property to sell, and waiting out the creditor window take far longer than anything you actually do.

Where you could be personally liable

Executors can be held personally responsible for mistakes. Distributing the estate before debts are settled is the classic one: if a creditor turns up after the money is gone, the shortfall can land on you rather than on the beneficiaries who already spent it.

Mixing estate money with your own is the second one, even without any intent to misuse it. And if the estate earns $600 or more in income during the year, such as interest or rent, it owes its own income tax return, separate from the person's final one. Missing that is a liability too. Anything complicated is worth a probate attorney, paid from the estate rather than out of your own pocket.

You can be paid for this

Executors are generally entitled to compensation for the work, either a flat amount the will sets or a fee state law sets, often a percentage of the estate. It is optional, and plenty of family members waive it.

If you take it, it counts as taxable income to you, reported on your own return, unlike an inheritance, which generally is not. Ask the probate court clerk what your state's default fee looks like if the will is silent on it.

Executor, administrator, and being a beneficiary too

If there is a will, you are the executor. If there is no will, or the named executor cannot serve, the court appoints someone instead, usually called the administrator, and the duties are the same either way.

Being named executor and being a beneficiary are not in conflict. Most executors inherit something too. The thing to hold onto is that you account for every decision the same way regardless, in writing, because the other beneficiaries are entitled to see it. If one of them disputes an appointment or a decision, that gets settled through the probate court, not informally.

You can say no

Being named does not require you to serve. You can decline, formally, as long as you have not already started acting, such as paying a bill from the estate or telling a bank you are the executor. Once the court has issued letters to you, stepping back takes a petition instead of a simple filing.

To decline, you file a written declination, sometimes called a renunciation, with the probate court before you act. Some states, California among them, let you file it alongside the initial petition for probate; the exact form and process differ by state, so ask the clerk's office in the county where they lived.

Declining is not a betrayal. Someone may have named you years ago, before they had a business or a property out of state, and before your own life got complicated. If you cannot give it the time, saying so at the start beats stalling for a year.

What to ask for immediately if you are acting

Questions people ask

For your own affairs, later

Being handed someone else's estate with nothing written down is often what makes people decide their own should not work that way. Personal Life Affairs Companion is built for that side of it: it records who you would name as executor, whether you have a will and where it is kept, and one status question about how far along proving your executor's authority already is. It never asks for an account number or a password, and it prints a book someone could actually follow. See Personal Life Affairs Companion.