The Preliminary Inventory (Part II)

Video

Hi folks, it’s Andy Stautz at Stautz and I am back talking about preliminary inventories. This is a follow up to my last video on preliminary inventories where things get kind of long and there was more to say.  

So just to follow up on a couple of points.  

Formatting the Preliminary Inventory

Once you’ve got the preliminary inventory prepared, so you’ve got, you think you’ve found all of the decedents property. You think you’ve got reasonably good estimates of value—we talked about how that could be a professional appraisal or that could just be a little bit of guesswork, but some basis.—You prepare the preliminary inventory, which is exactly what I’m talking about. It’s just item value, item value, item value. Just a list.  

And the court. Likes to see the list broken into separate categories. Especially in Marion County, it’s probably the most demanding. And some of these categories are always empty, some are like, you know, stock certificates. No one has stock certificates anymore.  

So it’s kind of weird sometimes how it breaks out, but it doesn’t matter what the sections are because ultimately it’s just a list and then you’ve got a total. Easy enough.  

What Do You Do With the Preliminary Inventory When It’s Ready?

Supervised Estates: File It

So once you’ve prepared this, you need to. . . basically . . . record it. So in a supervised state you file it. Because supervised estates, right, the court is involved at every step.  

Unsupervised Estates: Distribute and Verify

In an unsupervised state. You don’t need to file it. You just need to say Hi, Court, I promise I did it. And you also have to promise that the other beneficiaries of the unsupervised estate got a chance to see it. Or did see it.  

I think best practice there is probably just to send the inventory, instead of doing “they can see it if they want to”… just send the inventory to everybody, say “here it is.” And then file the verification with the court saying, “Yep, we prepared it and distributed it.”  

Because you know, with a lot of these administration things, the more clear and upfront you are, the lower your risk of conflict and conflict is the most expensive thing you can possibly do in a probate. So I’m trying to think if there are any other topics I wanted to cover, but I think that might have been it.  

Summary and Conclusion

You know you go searching for the property, you account for its value, you make a list, you tell the court you did it, and then you either show it to the court or distributees, you know, show it to the other people.  

And like I said it’s the basis, it’s the starting point that you’ll track to get to the final inventory and the closing statement. So it’s important to get it right and and preparing it is kind of the first big project for the personal representative. So there’s usually lots of back and forth between me and my clients on, OK, you know, what do we got here?  

So that’s all I have on preliminary inventories. I’m sure there are other topics or other questions that I could cover and I might later, but. That’s all for now. I hope you’ve enjoyed this one and tune in next time.  

Give me a call if you’ve got any questions about probate administration, because I love to help. Bye now.