Estate administration guides

How these differ from the state pages

The 9 state pages answer a specific question about a specific jurisdiction, and every figure on them is tied to a statute quoted verbatim. These guides do something different. They explain the reasoning that applies across states — how to read a title, why a trust document is not the same as a funded trust, why a bill arriving in week one should usually wait — and they do not attach a number to a jurisdiction.

That distinction is deliberate. Where a claim is jurisdiction-specific it belongs on a state page with a citation. Where it is general reasoning it belongs here, without borrowed authority it does not have.

What these guides will not tell you

• Who inherits. Intestate succession, will construction, and elective shares are governed by state law and by the specific document. Getting that wrong is expensive, and general guidance is the wrong instrument.
• Whether to hire an attorney. That depends on the estate, the family, and what you are comfortable being responsible for. The guides describe what raises complexity so the decision is better informed, not what the decision should be.
• Anything about tax. Estate, inheritance, income and capital-gains consequences interact, and a general article that gets one of them right can still lead to a costly mistake.
• What a specific bank will accept. Institutions apply their own policies on top of the statute. The guides describe the pattern; the institution states its own rule.

Where to start

If someone has just died and you have been named executor, start with the first-week guide, then classify the property before looking at any threshold. If you already know what the estate contains, the state comparison shows which route each state offers, and the navigator works through one case privately in this browser.