Finally! After three years of visiting the bank, filling out forms, consulting lawyers, making phone calls to state officials who are almost never at their desks, writing checks, and wandering around various government offices, we have wrapped up Aunt Joan’s estate! We can now begin to get rid of a high stack of no-longer relevant paperwork.
And this, mind you, was an estate in which every dollar left in it was already owed to the state–zero dollars left to distribute to the heirs. Why the state made it so hard to pay them off will always be a mystery to us.
Being the executor of an estate, even an estate with no money left in it, has got to be one of the most thankless and frustrating jobs ever invented in a fallen world. Back and forth and back and forth you go! You will understand how we wound up thinking the job would never be completed.
Aunt Gertie’s and Aunt Millie’s estates were in an even worse jumble, but then we had Billy the lawyer to walk us through it. But he retired before we could finish the work on Aunt Joan’s.
We hope we never again have to do anything like this. My wife, a highly skilled bookkeeper, was brought almost to her wits’ end. Couldn’t have done it without her.
I can empathize on this one, though my situation was not quite this complex, but enough for me. We can always be thankful for a spouse or relative who is attuned to handling such things.
I had a similar experience with my mother’s estate — and she owned nothing by the end except her clothes, a few books, and the maximum bank account (about $1200, I seem to remember) allowed by Medicaid. In other words, there was almost no estate. But it still took over a year to complete all the paperwork.
I echo your Hallelujah.
If anybody’s really mean to me, I’ll make him (or her) the executor of my estate.
Wow that’s a long time; glad its over
Amen! I’m glad to hear that!