Years ago, my husband’s father asked him to be the executor of his will. Frank (my husband) was touched that his dad trusted him enough to ask him to do this, so he quickly agreed. Sadly, dad died recently and my husband and I are now faced with what it can really mean to be an executor of a will.
First, we held a reading of the will during the same week that dad died because all of his children live in different states and the only time we could all be together was during the funeral. This was very hard as no one had enough time to grieve yet. The will was very simply stated. It named my husband as the executor and stated that everything was to be divided equally between the four children. Sounds simple enough we thought. Sell, collect and divide – right? Well, not when the deceased was as unorganized as dad was. The will did not state any details as to what assets dad had to be divided, and other than a few things, none of us actually ever knew what he had. Anyway, all the children went back to their own states and of course my husband (and I) were left to the task of discovering what to do next. After extensive searching of his home and the jointly held bank security box, we finally found all the insurance policies, deeds, titles, veteran papers, etc. that we needed. Why he didn’t keep all the important things in one place we will never know.
We figured the next step should be to file for the insurance monies so we could pay for the funeral. We discovered that he had several policies but only one of them stated a specific beneficiary and that one could not be turned over directly to the funeral home because it was a Veterans policy. Eventually, all of the children had to submit separate claim forms for the other policies and 1-1/2 months later, the funeral home is still waiting to be paid. They are being very patient about it though and they will get the money soon. This step just wasn’t as easy as we thought it would be. Filing for insurance claims is time consuming and they want to know things that we weren’t sure of anymore, like when dad’s parents died and their SS#’s !!!
Next we looked into selling his three properties. Well, this is when we decided we needed professional help. Turns out that some things are considered “estate” assets and some things are considered “non-estate” assets. It depends on whose names are on the deeds and/or titles. I went on line and looked up articles about “executors of wills” and most of them stated that although you can execute a will by yourself, it is advisable to obtain the help of an estate lawyer. So that is what we did. While the lawyer will be doing a lot for us over the next year, we still had to do most of the tedious work ourselves. There were three homes that had to be emptied out, cleaned and turned over to Realtors. Believe me, this was no easy task, especially when you do not live in the same state as the homes are in. By the way – if an item is considered “non-estate”, then you have to pay for all the expenses incurred with that item. You can not use the estate money for it. So needless to say, my husband and I have had to put out quite a bit of “up front” money out of our own savings. We will eventually get this back when the estate is settled because all the other children have agreed to reimburse us but this could be a long time down the road.
Currently we are at the step of selling his vehicles. At first it was hard to sell the truck because right now very few people are buying used full sized trucks because of gas mileage. With gas at $ 4.00 per gallon in most places, I sure wouldn’t want a vehicle that only gets 11 miles to a gallon. So we decided to practically give it away just to get it off the “to do” list. We still have his antique car to sell. That won’t be easy either. Seems like a 69 Oldsmobile 98 is not a popular antique car. Why doesn’t that surprise me !! Luckily, we have the lawyer to do some of the harder, more involved things like selling the stock and filing taxes. All the different taxes that will be due is one area that we will not even attempt on our own.
I guess what I want to say in this article is this: The next time someone asks my husband to be an “executor”, I am going to tell my husband to just pat himself on the back, feel grateful that someone trusts him, smile and then very quickly – say NO.
