Important Probate Deadlines

Your most impressive feats of adulting do not take place until the people who always thought that you were useless were gone. By the time you transported your children to multiple extracurricular activities while also keeping up with all your responsibilities at work, your parents were no longer healthy enough to notice. Your children judge you harshly whenever you exclude only 99 of the 100 foods they can’t stand from a meal or when you use a word that a social media influencer they follow recently decided was offensive, but they fail to realize how much planning and consideration goes into most of what you say and do. Now that you are facing the responsibility of acting as the personal representative of your recently deceased parent’s estate, you are almost finished with the hardest part; you will soon be able to retire from sandwich generation duty. Why is it so hard to get started on probate, after everything else you have done? Probate of a deceased parent’s estate is a rite of passage; it is the last time you will get money from your parents, and it means that you and your siblings will no longer be in your lives unless you choose to be. It is not just your imagination that probate is a slog, though. The good news is that you can get through it as a series of to-do lists, like you did with everything else, and the better news is that you do not have to get started on probate until you are ready. For help mentally preparing for the probate of a deceased family member’s estate, contact a Washington, D.C. probate lawyer.

Probate Cases Require the Personal Representative to Meet Many Deadlines

Some of the steps of probate have short deadlines. These are some deadlines that you must observe as personal representative of an estate in probate:

• Within 20 days of your appointment as personal representative of the estate, you must present the probate court with a list of interested persons.
• By three months after your appointment, you must submit an inventory of the decedent’s assets and known debts.
• If the decedent’s surviving spouse wishes to claim an elective share of the estate, the deadline for doing this is nine months after the decedent’s death or six months after the appointment of the personal representative, whichever is later.
• Any time someone files a petition in your probate case, the deadline for filing a response is 20 days after the court received the petition.

There Is No Deadline for Opening an Estate for Probate

Any of the above deadlines only apply after you or someone else has opened the estate for probate, and there is no legal deadline for opening an estate. Sometimes the decedent’s surviving relatives only open the estate many years after their relative died. Waiting a long time makes some aspects of probate more complicated, but from a legal perspective, there is no hurry in starting the probate case.

Contact Tobin O’Connor Concino P.C. About Summoning the Courage for Probate

A Washington, D.C. probate attorney can help you open a deceased family member’s estate for probate.  Contact Tobin O’Connor Concino P.C.  in Washington, D.C. or call 202-362-5900.

Source:

registers.maryland.gov/main/deadlines.html