Our Post-Mortem Services Allow You to Focus on What’s Most Important 

When a loved one passes, your attention is best focused on honoring their memory, comforting others, and dealing with your own grief. As your life goes on with its responsibilities, so do the lives of your family and friends, and they deserve your love and attention as always.

While you can take on all of the work yourself with administering the decedent’s estate (and trusts), there are a lot of ways to make mistakes without legal and tax counsel. Even without mistakes, experience shows that it can cost the same, or sometimes more, in legal fees when you do it yourself and then have a lawyer review (and possibly correct) your work than if it was completed by an attorney in the first place.

Special Needs Law Group of Massachusetts can work with you either way you choose. We provide reliable post-mortem trust and estate administration services that are designed to shepherd families through the post-mortem estate and trust administration process as seamlessly as possible.  

Estate Administrator and Trustee Responsibilities When Someone Dies

Your responsibilities can include some, or possibly all, of the following:

• Probating the Last Will and Testament in court
• Collecting, inventorying, and valuation of all assets
• Obtaining federal tax identification numbers for the estate and trust
• Preparing and filing one or more federal and state tax returns for decedent’s final state and federal income, estate income, or trust income
• Required Minimum Distributions from defined contribution retirement plans owned by the decedent and, if named as death beneficiary, by the estate or trusts
• Paying decedent’s unpaid bills, taxes, and claims, expenses of estate and trust administration, funeral costs, and any MassHealth claims against the estate and d4A Trusts 
• Selling real estate or other assets of the estate or trust
• Communicating with, calculating or making distributions to, beneficiaries
• Preparing and filing accounts with beneficiaries and the probate court
• Obtaining beneficiary assents to accounts and distribution
• Closing the probate estate

Due to statutory claims periods, an estate and revocable trust in Massachusetts cannot be administered completely until at least one year after the date of death, and in practice generally, it takes between one to two years. If problems arise, such as disputes among beneficiaries, mortgaged real estate held partly by the estate and partly by a third party, or lack of liquidity to pay taxes, administration can take longer.

We Can Help

Contact one of the post-mortem trust and estate administration lawyers at Special Needs Law Group of Massachusetts who can guide you through the post-mortem estate and trust administration process.

To schedule a consultation today, call our Framingham law office at: (508) 861-3453, or use our Contact Form now.