I recently met a married couple. They brought their adult daughter. After we finished discussing the business at hand, the daughter asked me how long it would take to probate an estate.
It seems like that should be a simple question, but it really isn’t. There are a couple of factors that go into this. First, is it a “small estate?” In Missouri, that means an estate of less than $40,000. Typically, what is involved in a small estate is that an interested person (a spouse, child, other heir, or a creditor) must file an affidavit with the probate court, and that affidavit has to stay in court for 30 days. The court publishes a notice, and creditors can make claims against the estate.
Once the 30-day claims period is over, if there are no creditor claims, the court will give the applicant an order that he or she can take to the bank or financial institution involved to get funds released. If there are creditor claims that need to be resolved, there will be a hearing, and that can take an extra month or so.
In the case of estates worth less than $15,000, the court doesn’t even have to publish a notice, and the affidavit doesn’t have to sit in the probate court. Those estates go faster.
Estates worth more than $40,000 require a full probate administration. That requires filing the decedent’s will (if there is one) and a petition to appoint a personal representative (a “PR”). We typically have to wait a week or two before we get an order of appointment. Once that order is issued, the court publishes a notice that an estate has been opened and that creditors have only six months to file a claim. The PR then has 30 days (extensions are allowed) to file an inventory of the decedent’s assets. Once the inventory is filed, the personal representative typically liquidates assets, pays bills, and waits.
Once the six-month claims period ends, any filed claims need to be heard in court and handled. The PR then must file an accounting and a proposed plan of distribution. Depending on whether it is a court-supervised or independently administered estate, either the court has to approve the accounting, or you have to allow beneficiaries time to object. If everything goes smoothly, a probate estate should take eight or nine months. If there are claims, difficult assets, an estate tax return, or any other number of things, it can take longer.
It turns out that the daughter’s question had a much simpler answer. Her son has what some might consider an interesting job. He cleans up crime scenes and places where people died. If someone is shot, he cleans up the scene. If there is an accident where someone is badly injured, he cleans it up. If someone dies from an accident at home, he cleans it up. Families also ask him to clean out the houses of family members who died naturally.
Anyway, he was asked to clean up a house where an elderly woman had died. While cleaning, he noticed that the house was nice, but needed some attention. He learned that the woman didn’t have any close family, and the distant relatives really didn’t want the house. The family members, in particular, wanted him to search for a will or a trust since they really didn’t know anything about the decedent’s personal business. He found nothing, so it looked as if the house was going to have to go through probate.
One other thing about her son: he flips houses. He finds a property, buys it, renovates it, and sells it. He thought the woman’s house would be a good property, so he was considering buying it, but since it would probably have to go through probate, he was curious how long that would take.
So, in response to the mother’s question, I explained that once the court appointed a personal representative, he or she could sell the house, so the buyer-son wouldn’t have to wait the entire probate period. She was relieved.
