What To Do After a Loved One Passes: Navigating Estate Administration
In the weeks after losing someone you love, a folder tends to land in your hands. Account statements, a will, maybe a trust document, and the assumption from everyone around you that you know what to do with it.
Most people don’t. Trust and estate administration follows a predictable sequence, and the decisions you make in the first several months carry far more weight than the volume of paperwork suggests. Here is what actually needs your attention.
Start by Confirming What Role You Hold
If your loved one had a will, the probate court appoints a personal representative. Being named in the will doesn’t give you authority to act. The court does, through a document called Letters of Authority, which is what a bank will want to see before it lets you access an account. You file in the county where your loved one lived, and most Michigan estates move through informal probate without a hearing.
If your loved one had a funded revocable trust, you may instead be the successor trustee. That role begins immediately at death and requires no court appointment. It often governs the majority of the wealth, leaving probate to cover a much smaller slice, or nothing. Some people hold both roles at once, with different obligations attached to each.
Confirm which applies before you take any action, because your authority, your deadlines, and your reporting obligations all follow from it.
The immediate tasks are straightforward. Order certified death certificates, since nearly every institution wants its own. Secure the residence and any vehicles, forward the mail, and notify Social Security, insurers, and retirement plan administrators. Avoid paying estate expenses from your personal accounts, and distribute nothing yet, no matter how insistent a family member becomes about a particular item. Recovering property once it has left your hands is difficult and sometimes impossible, and it’s your job to account for everything.
Find Out What You Are Actually Administering
A surprising amount of property never touches probate. Anything titled jointly with rights of survivorship passes to the surviving owner automatically. Retirement accounts, life insurance, and annuities go to whoever is named as beneficiary. Assets already retitled into a trust are governed by the trust document. Any probate estate is often far smaller than the family assumes, and occasionally it turns out there is nothing left to probate at all.
Building the picture takes legwork. The last two years of tax returns will surface accounts, rental properties, and partnership interests that nobody mentioned. Check the safe deposit box, the home safe, and the filing cabinet. Contact the attorney, the financial advisor, and the accountant, since they usually have a clearer view of the whole balance sheet than any family member. Ask about property in other states, because a second home or a rental somewhere else may need its own probate proceeding in that state.
Some assets need attention within days rather than weeks. If your loved one owned a business, someone must keep payroll running and the doors open while you sort out ownership. The insurance carrier for vacant real estate needs to be notified, since many policies limit coverage once a home sits unoccupied. Digital accounts, from the email that holds every statement to the online banking that pays the utilities, are far easier to reach if you find the passwords before anyone changes them.
Where Families Run Into Trouble
Once the court appoints you, you have 91 days in Michigan to file an inventory of estate assets. You will also publish a notice to creditors, which opens a four-month window for claims, and creditors you already know about get individual notice with their own deadline. An estate generally cannot close until that period runs, which means the earliest realistic finish for an informal administration is about five months, and most take considerably longer.
That waiting period exists for a reason. If you distribute property to beneficiaries and a legitimate claim arrives afterward, you may end up covering it personally. The pressure to move early is real, especially when someone needs money or a relative keeps asking about the car, but the answer is to explain the timeline rather than accommodating the request.
The other common problem is looser than a missed deadline. Open a dedicated estate or trust account and keep every dollar separate from your own, because commingled funds are difficult to untangle and easy to misread as self-dealing. Write down what you paid, when, and why, at the time you do it, rather than reconstructing it later. Loop in the accountant early, since tax filings run on their own schedule in the background. And send beneficiaries a short update every month or two, even when nothing has changed, because silence is what turns an ordinary delay into a suspicion and a suspicion into a lawsuit.
Grief Is Hard Enough. The Paperwork Shouldn’t Be.
You are carrying a loss and a fiduciary obligation at the same time, and the choices in front of you have consequences that last for years.
The Center for Estate Planning, a Maddin Hauser practice group, guides Michigan families through complex administration, coordinating trust and probate work, keeping the timeline on track, and keeping you clear of personal liability. Reach out when you are ready, and we will meet you where you are.