The presence of the smiley makes me think that carnivorousplant is reading the post as suggesting that one relocate the uncle into the P.O. box, rather than just using it for it’s intended purpose–collecting mail.
There is no loft. If he has a safety deposit box, he doesn’t have a key to it.
But we do have contact info for someone at the bank where he has his big savings account. If we’re lucky, he has more accounts and a box all at the same place. At the very least, I hope the banker has some way to search for accounts at other banks in the area than a personal visit to each armed with a death certificate. In the Chicago suburbs, that could take days or even weeks.
Yeah, we’ve thought of forwarding his mail to my cousin’s address, but we still have to find out what kind of documentation we need for that.
If your cousin does have it sent to his place, you have a real oppurtunity to prank him with letters from some mysterious person to your uncle.
Having just done some searching about this, it is kind of scarily easy to change addresses for someone else. The supervisor at the local PO told me just to turn in a form, they don’t even check ID. Also, there’s an online form. I haven’t gone through it because I don’t have the addresses handy, but it seems anyone can do it for anyone – exept you do need to acknowledge that you are subject to some criminal penalties if you do it for nefarious reasons.
I don’t know the law in the state where your uncle lived but some of this stuff requires that someone be appointed as Administrator of your uncle’s estate. I would think that the bank won’t give anyone information until someone is appointed.
Last time I looked into it, doing the address change online requires a valid credit card, and a $1 charge.
In all the paperwork for this uncle, can you find his income tax returns? If so, look for 1099-INT and 1099-DIV forms (or at least the Schedule B part of his return where he would have reported interest and dividend income). They will be provided by any banks or investment firms with which he earned interest or dividends last year.
Also, given that this estate is worth at least $173,000, shouldn’t the probate courts be involved?
Just as a hypothetical piece of information: It is a felony to file a change of address for someone as a practical joke and have all of their mail forwarded to a bar in Sante Fe…
Actually I was wondering what would have happened if my cousin had filed a change of address for my Mother when my Mother died.
The banks are not going to give random people with a death certificate access to information. Somebody has to be appointed by the court as executor, and everything has to go through them.
Do not forget to check with your state’s department that handles abandoned bank accounts. Then check it again every year for the foreseeable. It is online. This way you can scoop up any inactive accounts he might have forgotten about.
You can say that again. I hate to keep popping in as the thread killjoy, but this was precisely the thing that made my wife’s life a living hell for the past 5+ years. There was a judgement against my father in law when he died, and the recipient of the judgement tied up every single thing with liens, suits, you name it.
Sound advice. One of my brothers flat out accused other sibs of stealing from my mother’s house - he went through the drawers in her dressing table and sent out an accusatory email about the empty jewelry boxes he found there. That had no legs - as the known good pieces of jewelry were all accounted-for elsewhere, and in fact I recognized one of the empty boxes (when I looked in the same drawer) as having contained one of the elsewhere-found pieces.
My oldest brother and I went around the house and took digital photos of everything, including video clips, and I took a clip of him opening the main drawer where the jewelry was kept. Even with that, another brother demanded to know what happened to the “gold coins” he thought he saw in that step. I was rather glad there were two of us to attest to the fact that the “gold coins” were about 2 dozen quarters, worth, well, about 6 dollars. The flash from the camera, and lamplight, made them look gold in the photo.
And in this situation, there was a very clear will dividing everything up evenly, with a specific reference to personal goods being divided according to a signed list. The one sibling threw a tantrum because he felt that “personal goods” list was unfair (he didn’t get any of the jewelry). An ugly scene from an ugly person, and the rest of us have completely cut him out of our lives now that the estate is settled (this was going to happen anyway but that was just the, er, nail in the coffin).
Posters have been very polite here, but as the string goes on, you sound more and more like vultures worrying about how much meat might remain on the corpse. I have a very specific will just to avoid relatives like you - altho I do hide a lot of cash in files - and often forget which places I put it.
While our tone may be offensive, a man is dead after all, is it not the duty of the executor to get every little bit of everything and turn it over to the estate? Would it be better to fail to do a complete job? Why? Respect?
The dead no longer need their property. Their family and creditors may.
Oh well, so much for my ability to interpret possibly cryptic posts.
I’m pretty sure the hardest part of getting my grandmother’s adress changed after she died was determining which of her daughters wanted to deal with the mail.
It would have been funny. 
Unless you have also cut yourself off from everyone who might have to deal with your estate when you die and left them all as basically strangers who happen to share DNA with you, then your situation is in no way comparable to this.
Mine too. Three 30 yarders and we aren’t done yet. fortunately, the mess is going to be left for the next owner.
What a nightmare.