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Comment by innocenat | Hacker News Reader

This resonate deeply for me.

My dad unexpectedly passed away recently, and there were a lot of problems because we didn't even know his phone unlock PIN (to be fair, he did told us several time, just that none of us bothered to remember). But one of the main problems is that tons of research fund is tied up in my dad account, so it's basically frozen until we can execute his will.

My mom manage my dad tax return so at least we think we know where all his money and debts are.

This event prompted most of my dad co-worker to create something like this cheat-sheet.

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I would be surprised if you were legally allowed to go and modify assets before the will is executed.

I know when my partner died that I was not supposed to log in to her accounts and just transfer shit around; banks instead have very well defined processes for working out who is the legally correct person to do that and then empowering them to do so.

Remember, banks and other big companies deal with this all the time. They necessarily must have robust processes for doing it with the existing societal/legal systems of establishing who is the ‘right person’.

This is one of the reasons it's good (where possible) to have co-ownership of things like checking accounts. Though my mother is primary owner of her bank account, my sister and I can write checks, move money around as needed without waiting for any permission. My wife had the same arrangement with her father before he died, and it was a life-saver (so to speak).

As far as assets in the estate, the job of the executor is to preserve, as far as possible, the value of the assets at the time of death until they can be disbursed. That means, for example, don't take any intentional action to increase the value of the assets after the date of death, such as moving checking accounts higher yielding to certificates of deposit, etc.

It's perfectly legal to do that in my country as long as no benefactors is unhappy. In fact, we are encouraged (by the bank) to do that as the execution of will is painfully slow (at least 6 months).

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