A Step-by-Step Guide to Being an Estate Executor

Whether you’re planning ahead for your own heirs or have been asked to serve as an executor of an estate for someone else, it pays to understand what the role requires.

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Whether you’re planning ahead for your own heirs or have been asked to serve as executor for someone else, it pays to understand what the role requires. The executor shoulders the fiduciary responsibility to keep track of all assets and debts for the deceased person and executes the instructions in the will for disposing the assets. Claims against the estate could become the executor’s personal responsibility if funds aren’t handled correctly, says Hugh Drake, a partner with the Brown Hay & Stephens law firm in Springfield, Ill. The job can be a steep learning curve, especially if you know little about the deceased person’s possessions, the scope of the estate or where important papers were kept. Here’s a step-by-step guide of what the executor will need to do.

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Katherine Reynolds Lewis is an award-winning journalist, speaker and author of The Good News About Bad Behavior: Why Kids Are Less Disciplined Than Ever – And What to Do About It. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Fortune, Medium, Mother Jones, The New York Times, Parents, Slate, USA Today, The Washington Post and Working Mother, among others. She's been an EWA Education Reporting Fellow, Fund for Investigative Journalism fellow and Logan Nonfiction Fellow at the Carey Institute for Global Good. Residencies include the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and Ragdale. A Harvard physics graduate, Katherine previously worked as a national correspondent for Newhouse and Bloomberg News, covering everything from financial and media policy to the White House.