Choosing your executor

Being an executor is not an honour. It's a job. In broad terms they will have to:

• find the will, and arrange the funeral
• get death certificates, and notify everyone who needs telling
• find, list and protect everything you owned, and everything you owed
• apply for probate — usually within six months
• collect the assets and pay the debts before anybody gets anything
• deal with your tax
• then distribute what's left, and account for it

New South Wales's own guidance says it can take as long as twelve months to finalise an estate, and longer depending on the circumstances.

So: a year of forms, phone calls and waiting, done by someone who is also grieving you.

An executor can be held personally liable for getting it wrong. Distributing the estate before the debts and tax are settled, misidentifying who the beneficiaries are, selling something for less than it was worth, failing to protect or insure a property, unreasonable delay that costs someone money — the executor can end up personally on the hook for any of them.

That is not a reason to refuse. It is a reason to tell them before you name them, so they can say no while saying no is easy.

Anyone over eighteen. Family, a friend, a solicitor, an accountant, or a trustee company — including your state's public trustee.

A beneficiary can be your executor, and very often is. There's nothing improper about the person who inherits the house also being the person who administers the estate. It is the normal arrangement.

You can appoint more than one. Two executors can share a heavy job and check each other. They can also deadlock, and every document needs both signatures, which is slow when one lives in Perth and one in Brisbane. If you appoint two, appoint two who can be in a room together.

You can name a back-up, for if your first choice can't or won't do it. Worth doing. People die out of order.

Not the eldest. Not automatically.

The things that make someone good at this are organisation, patience with institutions, and being at a stage of life with some room in it. Being the firstborn correlates with none of those.

Some honest questions:

• Will they still be well enough, and around, in twenty years?
• Are they good at paperwork that goes wrong? Because it will.
• Can they be even-handed with your other beneficiaries?
• If there is a family that doesn't get on, are you putting one of them in charge of the others? That is where estates go to court.
• Do they live in Australia? An executor overseas makes everything harder.

And then the part everybody skips: ask them. Tell them what's involved. Tell them where the will is and where your list of everything is. Give them the chance to say no now, rather than discovering it at the worst possible moment.

An executor who was never asked can refuse the role after you die — and should do so early, before they start administering anything, if they're going to.

You can appoint a solicitor, a trustee company or your state's public trustee. It is a legitimate choice, and sometimes the kind one — in a family that fights, a neutral outsider protects everybody.

They charge, and the way they charge varies: a percentage of the estate, hourly, or both. Ask for the fee schedule in writing before you appoint anyone, and ask specifically what happens if the estate turns out to be complicated.

There's no figure here because there isn't one figure — it differs by state and by provider, and it changes.