The Expert Podcast

It's very common to have difficulties and inconveniences when it comes time to settle an estate. This could happen when a person is deceased or even if they're put into conservatorship or executorship, where there's somebody who may have assets. That's usually a family member, often of an older generation, and that person may get to be 80, 90 years old, and they die or have to go into long-term care. Their assets now need to start being looked at for distribution to whoever in their family or even outside the family is supposed to have them.

That's usually done with a will, sometimes a trust agreement, or intestate, which means there is no documentation and the state steps in. No matter what the scenario, the process is always going to be longer, harder, more inconvenient, and more complicated than you would think. The reason why is because the distribution of those assets is very closely monitored by officials, and for good reason. They want to make sure that the wrong people are not getting a hold of these assets.

If there's a will, they want to make sure that the assets go to who's named in the will, and there's usually an executor of that estate named in the will or provided for through other means. That executor is tasked with making sure that all the assets are identified and properly distributed. If, for some reason, the executor makes a mistake or intentionally or unintentionally converts assets to the wrong person, that can create conflict. Many times, there are disputes over who is supposed to get the assets. There may be assets that are hidden or not brought into the estate.

So how do you handle all this? Well, first of all, what we recommend is that if there is an estate to be distributed, the first thing is whoever is in charge of doing it gets a surety bond. You want to have that person bonded because they may or may not be an expert at this. Sometimes it's a family member or a trusted colleague who may not have experience in these financial matters.

You want to make sure that they get a surety bond so that if they do make a mistake, there’s some backup to it. Ideally, there's also frequent reporting. Many times, what happens is these estates are dragged out over months or years, and at the end, some of the things that happened early on are not known until the end. That’s where conflicts come in. So we recommend that the executor provides regular, ideally monthly, reporting on what's going on with these assets and distributes that report to all of the interested parties and stakeholders.

If you are a potential stakeholder, we would recommend that you strongly request or demand that the executor be bonded and also request that there are regular monthly statements so you can see what's happening in real time as it's happening, not have to wait till the end to see what the result was.

Third, it's ideal that the executor be somebody outside of the sphere of people who are receiving these assets. If they are within the asset class, sometimes there might be decisions made that benefit themselves versus other people or benefit insiders versus people that maybe they don’t think should get assets. Those are a few best practices for distributing assets in an estate or probate.

If there is a need to do an asset search, you can click the link below. If there's a need to discuss this with a licensed investigator or a licensed property and casualty insurer, you can also visit the consultation link to arrange that kind of discussion. But the reason we’re bringing this up is one of the most common types of fraud we’re seeing right now is what we call family law fraud—divorce, probate, wills, executorships, conservatorships. There’s a huge amount of fraud and a huge amount of assets being improperly distributed.

You’d expect that in a divorce because those people are already fighting and trying to grab as much as they can. But within an intact family, you wouldn’t expect that family members are going to try to steal money from people they’re still trying to retain a relationship with in the future. But you want to trust but verify what's happening with these assets and with the other parties to this estate.

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