When my mother died, her husband took all of the attending family out for dinner after the service. My brother thanked him for picking up the tab for the meal, and he replied “don’t thank me, thank your mother.”
A dinner as a part of the funeral expenses was reasonable, and so came out of the estate.
Of course, he was not only the executor, he was the prime beneficiary - a house my mother bought in 1963 for about $40,000 was worth an estimated $700,000 at the time, and it was all his. (I don’t begrudge him, he took full care of her during progressively worsening Parkinson’s for 20-plus years) Whatever he paid himself was trivial compared to that benefit. Not that we could complain, the common home pretty much always goes to the surviving spouse.
But, from other stories I’ve heard, nothing brings out the sibling rivalry and dredges up old wounds like a good inheritance fight. IMHO many executors deserve anything they get.
But to answer the OP - the executor has to satisfy debts and split the estate as willed (or default rules, absent a will). Unless someone wants to make a mutually agreeable deal, if the bulk of the estate is a single property, it pretty much has to be sold. If there’s a debt, someone has to pay it. If the property is not properly appraised and sold in a fair and public way, the creditors or heirs may have reason to start a lawsuit.
Yes, trying to sell for a reasonable amount of time then taking the best offer pretty much guarantees the property sold for what it was worth at the time. Sometimes it’s just a bad market.
Well… assuming it’s a secured by a deed of trust or a mortgage, why would the creditor care?
Either the new owner(s) continue to make the regular payments specified by the contract, in which case the creditor will most likely not care until the situation changes. (Or they can be paid off in full, they’ll happily take that too.)
Or whoever it is doesn’t keep making payments (or automatically in the case of a reverse mortgage) and the bank will have the ability to foreclose regardless of who currently owns the property. Dying doesn’t make the lien go away.
In neither case does it particularly matter to the bank who now owns the property. The only case where ownership will change the process significantly is when the ownership is made unclear by the death- in this case it may slow foreclosure because if they don’t know who owns the property it’s hard to fulfill the statutory requirement to notify the owners.
It’s not particularly uncommon (depending on the state) for banks to go to court to force a probate, for the purpose of determining the owner in order to be able to notify them and foreclose. There can be a tradeoff and a non-obvious choice of which is cheaper or faster (force probate judicially then non-judicially foreclose) or (judicial foreclosure directly.)
Amen to that. My dad went through that about 15 years ago when his mother died. I didn’t witness it, as it was fought out in Europe, but apparently things got quite acrimonious. So he wants things to go more smoothly for us kids when the time comes. He’s asked me to volunteer to be executor. So I had to man up and say “yes”.
New question- what if will says to split inheritance equally, but also specifies tha sibling A gets item a, sibling B gets b, C gets c, and D gets d. After debts are paid,
there is not enough cash to make equal value packets of a,b,c & d. What happens? The will seems to be self contradictory.
I suppose a simpler example would be: Will says, give Ralston $200K and Janice $100K, but estae only has $90K after debts are settled.
Hopefully all parties can agree to a settlement or at least on in independent arbitrator to divide things up. If not a judge is going to review it and make a decision, generally no one is happy when this happens. What happens a lot of times when people can’t agree is a large amount of the estate ends up being eaten by legal fees. Conveniently for the lawyers their fees have the highest priority.
A judge has a lot of discretion in how they handle it. A good legal argument citing other precedent would weigh heavily in the decision. If the will is to far from reality the judge might throw it out completely and instead divide things up as a standard inheritance.
In the case of Ralston and janice the judge might determine the intent was a 2/3-1/3 split and divide the 90k, 60k for Ralston and 30K for Janice.
If the interpretation of the will was Janice gets 100K and Ralston gets everything beyond that Janice could see 90k with Ralston getting nothing.
In the case of a friend of mine his fathers will specified he’d receive 2.5mil from a life insurance policy. His father had bought the policy without his wives knowledge. In that state if a life insurance policy is to pay out to anyone other than the spouse, the spouse must sign to that effect otherwise the proceeds go to the spouse. So legally the policy paid out to the wife and not the estate. My friend was effectively SOL. The will said he’d get 2.5 mil that didn’t actually belong to the estate. An agreeable settlement was reached in the end, my friend got less than his father intended but more than he had legal claim to.