My father had an accident and passed unexpectedly out of nowhere. He and my mom are both retired though he was running a consulting business. I don’t know what to do. I’m still processing the loss. But as we ask my mother more about his information to help settle things the more we find out she doesn’t really know anything.
He did all of the banking and paid all of the bills and handled the investments. She doesn’t know where anything is outside of their joint bank accounts.
Are there services that will help organize and access these kinds of things for us?
Father passed unexpectedly. My mom doesn’t know any of his passwords or where any of his investments are. Who can we contact ?
byu/milquetoast_wizard inpersonalfinance
Posted by milquetoast_wizard
18 Comments
I’m so sorry for your loss. 💔 It might be helpful to reach out to a probate attorney or financial advisor to help sort through his accounts and investments.
Joint bank accounts are a great place to start. You can see all the bills that got paid and what companies were doing any deposits. She can check with the big 3 brokerages to see if his IRAs were there. Did she never work or have any of her own?
Contact them directly. Some will require death certificates. Very sorry for your loss.
If you don’t know the passwords, it doesn’t really matter anyway depending on how strict the banks/investment firms want to be, especially if your mother’s name isn’t listed as an owner. Passwords I guess could be useful for viewing the balances on the accounts, but you can get yourself into hot water if you start moving money because to get the accounts in your mom’s or whoever’s name, you’ll need to provide a death certificate and that’ll have the date of death on it. If the institution sees questionable activity on the accounts after that date, it can raise some red flags and investigations.
I lost my wife in Jan and I’m going through this all now. I knew most of her accounts, but there are a few things that I have to try and dig to find. My estate attorney recommended just monitoring mail and email if you have access. Somehow your father will get monthly statements on everything, so they’ll come in the mail, or they’ll be email notifications. With that you can at least get bank/institution names and give them a call. Be aware that once you notify them of the death of the owner, they will lock the accounts and you probably cannot log in. If you have access to the accounts and want in, do so prior to calling. Again, I would not recommend touching any of the money, but if you just want to see what the balances are and stuff, I think that is fair game.
There are some states where the assets are automatically owned by spouses, they’re called community property states. You can do more research on those. Any account that has your mom as a joint owner is automatically hers. Any account that has only your father, but lists a beneficiary will bypass his estate and go to the beneficiary. Everything else will be part of the estate and will be reallocated per his will or probate.
Sorry for your loss.
Edit: Call SSA if you are in the States as soon as you can. If your mother is eligible for any social security on behalf of your father, the effective date is locked in the day you call, not the date of death. If your mother has no social security on her own and relied on your father’s, and she waits 2-3 months to inform them, they will probably ask for those 2-3 months of payments back, and she will only get benefits from the date she calls going forward. When you call, it’ll probably be a 1-2hr hold until you talk to someone. Then it’ll be a .5-1hr long call to get all the info across, and that is just an intake call. They will schedule you for an actual appointment (mine was phone) with the local office and that will be like 3-4 weeks out. So your mom will go without social security until then. But she will receive back pay back to the date she originally called.
Look at last year’s tax return returns, maybe order a tax transcript?
Have a skilled computer guy come over & hack into the computer. All the passwords will be saved there.
You could have your mother check the tax returns of recent years. That might reveal which places he used for investing.
To get information about accounts that do not include her as a co-owner, she may have to open a probate estate, have herself named as administrator, and get Letters of Authority showing that she is authorized to speak with the custodians.
Did you dad have any specific place that he might have filed paperwork? If so, check those files because not everyone receives all their investment statements and other documents electronically. You will also be able to look at previous tax returns to see which companies had sent 1099s for capital gains, dividends, retirement distributions, etc. The checking accounts will also be helpful in identifying if he was taking distributions from retirement accounts or other accounts. Your mom also needs to look at all the physical mail received because he may still receive communication from investment firms, such as statements, disclosures, information on new funds, etc.
I’d also make a plan to check with the unclaimed funds database in the state where your dad lives in five years and then annually or every couple of years thereafter to check for any funds that were sent to the state due to lack of communication with your father.
It seems like a terrible idea to get an outside service, basically welcoming hacking into the accounts. Everything will become evident by going through the postal mail and (if you have access) his email.
My Dad was an early adopter of email (for his generation) and had a mobile phone. Between his email and mobile phone– I completely took over all his banking and finances, retirement accounts, everything when he was incapacitated.
If you have access to his email account and his cell phone, you’ve got a great start
If his cell phone isn’t locked, it will be the key. In most cases, you will know his login because it will be his email address, and with 2FA (provided by the phone) plus access to his email on the phone, you should be able to get into almost everything by resetting passwords you don’t know. Focus first on how the most important bills are paid such as the mortgage and work backward to the least important. I am sorry for your loss.
Sorry for your loss. If possible, check his browser history. He may have logged into banks’ sites. With any luck, he saved the logins/passwords.
I’m assuming there’s a computer that she hopefully has a password to. I found when my mom was suddenly incapacitated that once I got ahold of her computer I could access most of her accounts to keep the lights until she was back.
Also his phone.
She does need to be careful about the laws surrounding death and probate. So be careful there.
Sorry for your loss. Difficult to deal with grieving when there is so much to figure out and do.
Make sure you get access to his phone. Hopefully you have his passcode. From there, focus on getting access to his email. From that, you can see a lot of the statements that have come in, reset passwords and be able to build out a list of all the accounts you need to find.
As someone that is CONSTANTLY helping his elderly parent with his accounts I recommend getting access to the email before anything else. At least that will give you the ability to hopefully get password resets initiated once you figure out where the accounts are. It might also help you locate accounts via emails about statements for accounts etc. Of course it is not an absolute solution but it is a great place to start.
Tax transcripts and run a credit check on all three reporting agencies, for a start. Look through old mail for statements, bank statements for deposits/transfers from other institutions, etc.