If it’s too late for this section, then good luck! At least you can still benefit from my checklist to be found in the After Death Actions section.
Estate Planning
Step 1: Assist your parent in writing a legal will. If your parent has more money and belongings than you would leave in a joint checking account, then pay an attorney to have a revocable living trust (RLT) set up. While you’re at it, also have your attorney write a Power of Attorney (POA), Healthcare Power of Attorney, and Living Will documents. Spell out the terms of how you become trustee if your parent is no longer able to be their own trustee. (My mom’s trust required 2 doctors to declare her unable to handle her own affairs. Her Power of Attorney document required only 1 doctor’s letter.)
Step 2: Put everything they own into the trust except vehicles and a checking account. Title the vehicles “TOD” to you. Create a joint checking account and a joint credit card account with you and your parent. Set up every bill, every investment, every income stream, and everything else you can think of online so that you can access and manipulate it more easily while your parent is alive and after they are dead.
Step 3: Put everything else — stocks, bonds, mutual funds, cash, property — into the revocable living trust. Some things, however, with specific beneficiaries should not be in the trust, specifically retirement products like IRA’s and annuities and also life insurance policies. There is no point having a trust if it is not funded with something.
Step 4: Obviously, if your parent is still married, everything should go to their spouse, but you can go ahead and set it up so that you (their adult child) is next in line. And if both of your parents are elderly, you might consider skipping the spouse as trustee/executor and having it be you.
If your single, divorced or widowed parent has an IRA, verify that the beneficiaries have been properly updated with the desired people. Do the same for life insurance policies. You do not want to be the person whose parent still has their deceased or divorced spouse listed as their beneficiary, that is just one more thing to deal with after they pass away.
U.S. Savings Bonds
By all means, if your parent has some U.S. Savings Bonds hiding in their safe deposit box or the attic or wherever, take my advice and get them cashed out before they die! My God, that took forever and was a ton of trouble. If your parent dies, then your bank cannot cash these bonds for you and you have to mail them to this place that takes absolutely forever to do it. This website can help you figure out what they are worth. Individual – Cashing (Redeeming) EE and E Savings Bonds Your local bank can cash them if your parent is alive. If dead, then you have to send them via snail mail to Treasury Retail Securities Services and hope that you don’t die yourself before they send you the money.
The Body
Plan ahead what will happen to the body. Decide how you will deal with the body and select a specific place of business to handle it. Shop around for the best prices but do not prepay. Put their phone number in your contacts.
Moving Money
It instantly becomes hard to move money around after entities discover that your parent is dead. If you are lucky enough to have a little warning of their impending death, then hastily move the money where you want it to be. In my case, I wanted enough money in our joint checking account to pay the bills, but not so much that its disbursement to heirs would exceed the tax free limit. And my mom had trust accounts at two different financial institutions (a local bank and a brokerage firm). I moved the smaller one (at the local bank) to the brokerage firm so that I could disperse it to the heirs in one fell swoop.
Next Step: Immediately After Death