By Stephen Walter, attorney and co-founder of Sunset
As the first professional a family hires after a death, when the service ends and the casseroles stop and the questions turn to the estate, and they come to you, it’s important to have an understanding of the big issues families will face.
I have settled estates as an attorney, as a son-in-law and, now as a CEO with more than 15,000 families who’ve navigated the process. The same five surprises come up every time. Surprises that funeral professionals can help communicate.
1. The real toll of the work is emotional.
Families brace for grief at the funeral, but nobody warns them it is also waiting in the paperwork.
Settling an estate means saying it out loud, over and over: calling a bank to explain that your mother died, then explaining it again to the next person they transfer you to, then spelling her name for the letter that confirms it. Every form and conversation is a small ceremony that reminds someone of their grief.
Even good news is hard. My company sends a few thousand emails a week that essentially say, ‘We’ve found a life insurance policy or bank account, click here to claim and transfer.’ But I know that email can also be painful to read for a family member in grief. Sometime taking their name off an account, or closing it, even when you don’t have to call the bank or visit a branch, can feel like erasing a small piece of the deceased.
So, the work happens a few minutes at a time, on the days the person can stand it.
What you can do as a funeral professional: When a family asks how long this takes, build the emotional half into your answer. If the death certificate takes two to six weeks, let them know every bank runs by its own clock. A family that expects to settle the estate in six months and gets twenty-four feels cheated; one that expects six months and gets six weeks feels lucky.
2. The will is not a key to unlock problems.
I think some people expect what they see in the movies: The family sits at a table and opens a sealed envelope with all their questions answered. Unfortunately, that’s not how it works. A will says nothing about what is in the estate: no account numbers, no balances, no safe deposit box, no insurance policy and no passwords.
In addition, having a will does not mean escaping probate court. If a will exists, it typically means the executor will be required to go through probate court.
A trust, unless perfectly executed by the deceased before dying, can make the process even more complicated for the family. Of the thousands of trusts that we’ve helped with after death, less than 5% were handled perfectly during life.
3. Nobody is coming to tell them where the money is.
Ten years ago, you could tell a family to open the mail for a few months and let the statements come.
Statements don’t come anymore.
They go to an email account nobody can get into, from institutions nobody remembers. There is no national registry of bank accounts, and no company has a duty to call the family. The 401(k) administrator from a job he left in 1998 does not know he died.
Families assume that if something is theirs, they will hear about it. The opposite is true: Anything they don’t find stays lost, until the state eventually takes it as unclaimed property.
Sunset is the only automated search that covers every account type, and it queries the financial industry’s own databases directly instead of guessing from old mail. It is free for families. But whether they use us, a state database, or a shoebox of tax returns, the point stands: The money does not announce itself. Somebody must go looking.
4. Probate court is the DMV, not Law and Order.
Say the word “probate” in your arrangement room and watch the family flinch.
The fear is imported entirely from television: a courtroom, a contested will, a lawyer sweating as they approach the judge.
Actual probate in most counties is a service window. Forms are filed, a fee is paid, a clerk checks the paperwork. Most judges never want a hearing, and the ones who do increasingly hold it on Zoom for five minutes of simple questions. In most states and most counties, a family can do this without a lawyer, and most estates qualify for a streamlined path.
In fact, at this point it’s actually hard to find an estate settlement attorney who works on uncontested cases. The ratio of estate planning attorney to estate settlement attorney is 100:1.
You can lower a family’s blood pressure with one sentence: For most estates, this is paperwork, not a court case. The exceptions are real and may involve a contested will, property in several states, or a business— and those deserve a lawyer. But they are the exceptions.
5. A family that did not get along in life does not start getting along after the funeral.
You already know this one.
Death is not a reconciliation event. The son who hasn’t called in six years arrives with six years of material. The sibling who did the caregiving carries an invisible ledger the others have never seen. Then one child is named executor, which sounds like an honor but gives them a fiduciary duty with authority over the rest, and the fights that follow are rarely about the dollars.
You can’t fix that and shouldn’t try. But you can pass along the advice I give to every family: Put one person in charge of the whole estate, ideally the person named in the will, and have everyone else sign a simple appointment and waiver saying so. No, it is not legally necessary. Maybe I am just a lawyer through and through, but I have watched what a signature does to a family. The person who signed away the job in March has a much harder time second-guessing it in August. It turns silent resentment into stated consent.
The other half of the bargain belongs to the executor: Be scrupulous about the accounting. Every dollar in, every dollar out, written down as it happens, so that when a sibling asks a pointed question a year from now, the answer is in a spreadsheet. It is hard, thankless work. Executors do not get thanked nearly enough by their families. They basically were assigned a very annoying, bureaucratic, part-time job by the deceased.
Why This Is Yours to Say
None of this is legal advice, and none of it should be. It is orientation, delivered in the 90 seconds when a family trusts you more than anyone else. They will remember who told them what was coming before they knew what to ask.
Stephen Walter is an attorney and the cofounder of Sunset (hellosunset.com), which helps families settle estates end to end: finding assets, preparing probate documents, opening estate accounts and transferring inheritances. Sunset is free for families and has helped more than 15,000 of them, in all 50 states. Both of Sunset’s founders started the company after settling estates for their own loved ones.
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