When I go up to Boston later this month, I am going to speak to her condo’s board of trustees to see if they will recommend a real estate agent for me. I will also contact her lawyer again and mention everything that’s been discussed in this thread and see if she can recommend a CPA to me. (Quartz, I don’t know if we set up local administrators in the US, but I’ll ask the lawyer about doing this, as well.)
My father volunteered to call our credit union today to see how to go about setting up an estate account (and the EIN if needed) and also to call her bank to see if she was having paper bank statements mailed to her (he didn’t find any in her papers). He will also call the mortgage lender to see if they recommend stopping payments (he doesn’t want the interest to accrue, but I don’t want us to have to be responsible for making the monthly payments). Because we have received no money from her estate so far (I think that will be in January at the very earliest…probably months later), we would have to pay everything ourselves and let the estate reimburse us later, and we don’t have that kind of money at easy access.
I already paid her last credit card bill (it was only $124), but I’m keeping track of it and everything else I’ve paid so far. I will definitely make a point of keeping travel/gas/food/etc receipts when I go up to Boston in the coming months.
I’m grateful that she lived a simple life! I can’t imagine what this would be like if she had all kinds of investments, multiple properties, her own business, etc. etc. etc. :eek:
I think this should be clarified. Whoever administers the estate is responsible for seeing that the payments get made, NOT for making the payments out of her own money. A professional administrator wouldn’t do anything that the OP couldn’t do, in regard to making such payments - and in fact would do less: the OP might front some costs (e.g. that credit card bill) which the administrator would NOT.
Just wanted to update to say that we contacted her student loan lender (Direct Loans), and they said all we needed to do was mail them a copy of her death certificate and they would waive repayment.
Holy shit. $100,000+ debt I don’t need to worry about anymore!
My dad also took care of a bunch of stuff, dropping my mom’s death certificate off at the Social Security office, getting information about her investments, etc. We also heard back from Harvard Medical School about what we would like them to do with my mother’s remains after they have used them for research purposes. I think the only big thing we need to do now is clean out her condo and get it ready for sale. (Motorgirl, I may take you up on your offer soon. We’re going to check first with the condo to see if they have a realtor they always use.)