Estate planning content always jumps to the finish line. Who gets the house. How to avoid estate tax. Trusts.
Nobody writes about the first three weeks.
Which is a problem, because the first three weeks is where families actually get hurt. Not by taxes. By liquidity.
Here is the scene. A man dies on a Tuesday. He has $1.4 million across various accounts, a paid off house and a perfectly reasonable will.
By Friday his widow cannot access most of it, the funeral home wants several thousand dollars up front, the mortgage on the rental property is due on the first, and his pension stopped the day he died.
The estate is worth $1.4 million. The family cannot get $9,000. That gap, between wealth and access, is where the real damage happens.
Today we walk through exactly what happens, day by day, and the handful of free things that prevent almost all of it.