When I die, someone's got to do it

In My Humble Opinion
1

Being a responsible (partly) adult (by calendar) I have a Trust and a Will. Yay me–someone gets my stuff when I die. They can avoid probate for the most part and they have to divide everything up according to my wishes.

Of course, it falls on my named Executors to do all the leg work. My estate isn’t that grandiose, but there is a house, some stocks, retirement plans, contents of the house, vehicle, etc. My Executors will be busy. I’ve made provisions for them to get a bigger share of the proceeds in thanks for the work they have to do, but no matter how much I give them (and it isn’t near enough to cover the hassles involved) they will need time off from work to manage things. Coupled with them being out of town, I feel there must be a better way.

I don’t know how many old movies I’ve seen where there’s some lawyer, invariably a friend of the deceased, who steps in at this point, reads the will and (usually) acts as Executor. That’s great but I don’t have any friends who are capable of filling that model.

Investigating ideas on line I find I can hire a fiduciary to do this. But I interviewed one and it’s entirely too formal for my taste. They lock up the house, inventory every item of any potential value and take a long time at a high cost to do the work. It’s not unreasonable, but my estate isn’t worth that much trouble.

So do y’all know of an alternative that would be more casual–like the kindly, old lawyer friend who I can hire to do the involved work of spreading my wealth to my heirs and assigns (for a fee, of course) but won’t feel the need to cordon off my domicile while they inventory every pencil and book therein? Since I don’t have one in mind, I’m thinking you might suggest a lawyer that I could meet with, hand over a set of keys to my house, a copy of the Trust and Will and leave it at that. What type of lawyer is this? The place that drew up the Trust does not offer this service and did not offer any suggestions beyond that of hiring a fiduciary–which I described above.

2

The time-consumingest part is the clearing out of the house and getting it ready to hand over to a realtor to sell. Try looking for a senior citizen’s downsizing or relocation organization to handle this big chunk. They know how to do all these tasks and at lower hourly fees than lawyers or fiduciaries.

3

Lawyers charge by the hundreds of dollars per hour, and time-consuming clerical or administrative work is absolutely not the kind of think you want to hire a lawyer to do. The business model for professional executor services assume that you wouldn’t be hiring a professional unless your estate was very valuable and quite complex, so the service they offer is unlikely to be attractive to you if your estate is modest and straightforward.

The people with an interest in doing the boring work associated with sorting out your property affairs when you die are the people who will get the lion’s share of your stuff. If you make advance arrangements to pay somebody else to do it, they get less stuff, because the costs of paying the somebody else come out of the property that would otherwise go to them. If you appoint them as executors they they can decide how much work they want to do themselves, so as to maximise their inheritance, and how much they want to pay someone else to do, so as to minimise their trouble. Why second-guess what they would choose to do? Appoint them as executors and let them decide what to do themselves and what to hire someone to do.