Mom Died. Then Came the Financial Ordeal

Your bank may drive you nuts

Upon receiving my letters testamentary, I needed to open an estate checking account for receiving money owed the estate and paying its expenses. This was easy at PNC Bank, where Mom had a savings account.

Things didn’t go so well at Capital One, where Mom had bank accounts, a credit card and a car loan.

First, the bank accounts. At Mom’s local branch, an employee scanned the death certificate and my letters testamentary, and I filled out a form indicating how I wanted to receive the money. I was told that the estate department, which had no number I could call, would be in touch. Then came weeks of back-and-forth communication: a request from the bank for more information or another form, my response, a five-day delay, then another request. When, after nearly two weeks of silence, I still hadn’t received the money, I wrote to say I would be filing a complaint with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the New Jersey attorney general. That got me a speedy — and classic — response: The check was in the mail. Nearly two months after my visit to the bank, that check finally arrived. Meanwhile, the bank’s credit card department was calling me constantly about my mother’s small credit card balance.

The auto loan was another source of frustration. At the time of her death, Mom’s monthly payments were being automatically deducted from her checking account. When a regular payment was deducted from her account a week after she died, Capital One reversed the transaction. I tried to make the payment with my own funds, but was rejected. As soon as I received my letters testamentary, I prepared to pay off the loan—which is when I saw the late fees for the payments never made because the bank wouldn’t let me. With my record of attempted payment in hand, I protested. They removed the fees, and I paid off the car. (I reached out to Capital One for comment. They now provide a phone number for the estate department, but only for help with bank and credit card accounts. You still have to call the auto loan department separately.)

Lesson 3: Keep detailed records of all calls and conversations with institutions you deal with. File a complaint with regulators if you are not being treated fairly.

Utilities aren’t easy either

Unless you are listed on an account, phone, wireless and internet providers probably won’t talk to you on the phone. They may tell you to go to one of their stores and bring a death certificate and letters testamentary. Ironically, soon after I did that and got added to my mother’s Verizon Fios account, I went to a store to close it … but was told I had to do that via the phone. Closing Mom’s mobile plan took three visits to an AT&T store and happened, miraculously, even though I didn’t have the account password they expected me to know.

Lesson 4: Get your name added to utility accounts so they are easier to manage.

Paperwork can be a pain

My mother had a brokerage account at TD Ameritrade with a few stock holdings. Transferring those assets to the estate was easy. Mom also owned four individual stocks that she had never put in her brokerage account. These took a lot more work. The beneficiaries had to fill out a form with their tax information and address. I also had to obtain a “medallion guarantee” from a bank — a document confirming my identity and legal authority to transfer stock.

The difficulty continued after I mailed all the documents to Computershare, the transfer agent for the stock. Two weeks later, tracking the package online, I saw it had stopped dead at a post office. Computershare then told me that the mailing address on their website was for an office that had been closed for some time. Luckily, the post office found the package and forwarded it to the right location.

Lesson 5: Consider moving directly held stocks into a brokerage account or use a “transfer on death” (TOD) designation. If you’re the executor, send important documents using a service that allows you to track shipments.

Try Swedish asset death cleaning

My parents bought land in Vermont in 1975, intending to build a second home. They never did, but they never sold the land either. Since it’s in another state, I had to hire a local attorney, open an ancillary estate and find a real estate agent. The property finally sold in June.

Lesson 6: Selling unused assets now will smooth things after you’re gone. Consolidating financial accounts may help too. People talk about Swedish death cleaning of one’s home, but no one talks about asset death cleaning. Sounds morbid, but we should do it.

Get ready for the feelings

One more challenge is worth mentioning: This is emotional work. Transferring the hard-earned assets my parents had accumulated over their lifetimes was sad. Turning off the cell service to a phone I had once called daily was so painful that I put it off for months. I shed many tears as an executor, some from frustration but most from the sadness of losing Mom. I was lucky to have a supportive wife and siblings as well as help from an attorney. If you are an executor, don’t be afraid to lean on others for help.