Being named executor is a job most people learn while grieving. A plain-English checklist for the first month: who to call, what to file with the probate court, and where the common traps are.
Almost nobody is trained to be an executor. You are named in a will, usually years before anything happens, and then one day the phone rings and the job starts. It starts on the worst week of your life, and it comes with deadlines, paperwork, and a vague sense that getting it wrong has consequences.
The good news is that the first 30 days follow a fairly consistent shape, whatever state you are in. The details vary by state and county, and a probate attorney is worth consulting for anything beyond a simple estate, but the sequence below covers what most executors and administrators actually face in the first month.
One note on words. If there is a will, the person who administers the estate is the executor. If there is no will, the probate court appoints an administrator. Some states use the term personal representative for both. The job is broadly the same.
Order certified copies of the death certificate. The funeral home usually offers to order them from the state or county vital records office. Say yes, and order more than you think you need. Ten is a sensible starting point. Banks, insurers, retirement plan administrators, and the probate court will each want one, and many insist on a certified copy rather than a photocopy.
Find the will. The original, not a copy. Common locations: a home filing cabinet, a safe, a safe deposit box, or with the attorney who drafted it. If you cannot find it, contact any attorney the person was known to use. The original matters because most probate courts require it to open the estate.
Secure the property. Lock the house, collect mail, move valuables somewhere safe if the home will sit empty, and keep paying or pausing essential utilities. An empty house is a practical risk, and as executor you are responsible for preserving the estate's assets.
Notify the Social Security Administration. Funeral homes usually report the death to the SSA as part of their service, but confirm it was done. Benefits paid for the month of death and after usually have to be returned, and a surviving spouse may be eligible for survivor benefits, so the earlier the SSA knows, the cleaner things are.
Tell the banks, but do not rush to close anything. Notifying a bank freezes the account against fraud. Closing accounts and moving money comes later, once the court has formally given you authority. Keep records of every account you find.
Start a folder and a list. Physical or digital, it does not matter. Every letter, every statement, every receipt. Executors who keep records from day one save themselves enormous pain at tax and distribution time.
File with the probate court. Probate is opened with the probate court in the deceased's state or county, usually the county where they lived. You file the will and a petition, and the court issues the document that gives you legal authority: letters testamentary if there is a will, letters of administration if there is not. Institutions will ask for this document constantly, so order several certified copies.
Not every estate needs full probate. Most states have a simplified or small-estate process below a certain value, often using a sworn affidavit instead of a court proceeding. Assets with named beneficiaries, such as life insurance and retirement accounts, and assets held in joint tenancy or in a living trust, pass outside probate entirely. It is worth understanding what actually needs to go through the court before assuming everything does.
Get an EIN and open an estate bank account. The estate is its own taxpayer. You request an employer identification number from the IRS (free, online, takes minutes) and use it to open an estate bank account. All money flowing in and out of the estate should move through that account, not through anyone's personal account. This single habit prevents most of the disputes that arise between executors and beneficiaries.
Note the tax deadlines. The deceased's final individual income tax return is still due to the IRS, by the usual April deadline of the year after death. If the estate itself earns income while it is open, it may also need its own income tax return. Most estates owe no federal estate tax (the exemption is high), but a tax professional can confirm what applies. Put the dates in a calendar now.
Contact the employer, if there was one. Final wages, accrued vacation, group life insurance, and the 401(k) plan all run through the employer or its plan administrator. Retirement accounts go directly to the named beneficiaries, not through you, but families often need help finding out who the plan administrator is, and that starts with the employer's HR department.
Notify insurers and the credit bureaus. Life insurance claims can usually start with a death certificate and a claim form. Notifying the three credit bureaus flags the file and helps prevent identity theft, which is depressingly common against the recently deceased.
By the fourth week, the urgent legal mechanics are usually in motion, and the long tail begins: the accounts. A typical adult holds dozens of them. Email, cloud storage, photo libraries, streaming services, brokerage apps, payment apps, subscriptions still billing every month.
Cancel recurring charges. Go through two or three months of bank and card statements and list every recurring charge. Each one is a subscription to cancel or a service to transfer. This is tedious, and it is also real money leaking out of the estate every month it is ignored.
Close or memorialize the big platforms. Most platforms will close an account when shown a death certificate. Some offer more: Facebook can memorialize a profile, Google has its Inactive Account Manager, and Apple has Digital Legacy. The catch is that the most useful options only work if the person set them up before they died.
Expect the digital estate to be the slowest part. Without credentials or advance setup, getting access to account contents (rather than just closing them) involves each platform's bereavement process, substantial documentation, and sometimes a court order. Nearly every US state has adopted a version of the law known as RUFADAA, which gives fiduciaries a legal path to digital assets, but the practical reality is still slow and uneven.
The estates that resolve quickly are almost always the ones where the person left a map: a list of accounts, where the passwords live, and what they wanted done.
First-time executors often carry more anxiety than the role requires. A few things that are not your job:
Keep a short written log. One line per day you work on the estate: what you did, who you spoke to, what they said. It takes a minute, and it answers almost every question a beneficiary, a court, or a tax preparer will ever ask you. The executors who struggle are rarely the ones who made a wrong call; they are the ones who cannot reconstruct what happened.
And be gentle with yourself. You are doing detailed administrative work in the weeks after losing someone. Slower than you would like is still on time.
Then you have the chance to do the single most useful thing on this page: make the job easier for whoever will one day do it for you. Write down where your will is. List your accounts, your insurance policies, your retirement plans, and where the passwords live. Tell your executor the list exists.
Every step in this checklist gets shorter when the person who died left a map. Most people never do. Be the exception.
Aftr helps you build a secure inventory of your accounts, documents, and wishes, released to the right people when the time comes. The first 30 days are hard enough. Make them shorter for the people you love.
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