I’ve just dealt with two unrelated deaths of SS recipients.
If you call SSA, you’ll be sure they know. If you don’t call, they figure it out quickly once the death cert is prepared.
You can expect the last benefit paid to be clawed back out of whatever account SSA paid into within a couple weeks.
A gotcha is that strictly speaking, a benefit is not payable for the month in which the recipient died, even if they die on the 29th.
e.g. somebody gets their May check on May 10th then dies on May 15th. It’s about May 25th when SS learns of the death (whether from you or the DC or wherever is immaterial). Meanwhile, they’ve already committed to making the Jun 10th payment becasue their systems are not real-time by any stretch. You can expect to see the Jun 10th payment appear on June 10th, then be reversed out of the account later in June, followed by having the May 10th payment reversed out also.
Fines and penalties start to play if the death has been concealed for months. Not for a couple weeks.
A friend of mine went through exactly this last year; her husband was on SSDI, and he died at 10pm on the last day of the month. The SSA reversed out his monthly payment for that month (much to her surprise and chagrin).
I’ll just add that SSA acted pretty quickly in my father’s death. He died on a Saturday, which was the scheduled day of his deposit. His SS was there on Monday, but gone within 48 hours.
I highly doubt the attorney that wrote up the trust and or the will would have any idea about what assets are in the trust. Funding a revocable trust is normally the responsibility of the grantor. This is normally done by changing the title on things to the name of the trust, ie. a home, vehicles, bank accounts, brokerage accounts, etc. The trust can also be named as a beneficiary for things like life insurance, retirement accounts, etc. In quite a few cases this doesn’t get done, because the individual get busy and time passes.
The primary purpose of revocable trusts are to facilitate passing along assets after you die, to avoid lengthy probate issues, as well as to mitigate tax issues for your heirs in the event of a large estate.
Whose name(s) are on the account? If her name is the only name on the account, I would be very leery of making a payment from it after her passing.
My parents had several joint accounts, and when my father passed, my mother had no problem continuing the use the accounts. When she passed, the accounts were frozen immediately upon my notifying the bank of her death. My sister and I were listed as beneficiaries on the account, so the funds were disbursed to us. However, we were told in very clear terms that we were not to write any checks or try to make electronic payments on the old account. We told to wait until the funds were disbursed, and then either deposit the funds in our personal accounts or open a new estate account. We should then pay off any obligations from wherever the funds ended up.