Estate & Trust Administration For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Chapter 21

Ten Pitfalls for the Unwary

IN THIS CHAPTER

Avoiding careless mistakes and sidestepping administration dangers

Using good judgment

So much of administering a trust or estate is similar to handling your personal finances. However, you can easily forget that you’re actually working in a fiduciary capacity, not an individual one, and that there are some major differences. In fact, one of the biggest issues we’ve run up against when assisting clients, family, and friends in their adventures in administration is in articulating where the differences lie. This chapter covers many of the lessons we’ve discovered regarding what you definitely should — and shouldn’t — do when administering an estate or trust.

Failing to Terminate an Existing Real Estate Purchase and Sale Agreement

As far as costly mistakes go, not ending an existing real estate purchase and sale agreement when the decedent is the seller is huge! Keeping the original agreement in place may substantially increase the taxes you’ll owe on the sale, costing the estate, and the eventual heirs, big-time.

Real estate rarely changes hands on the day the buyer and seller agree to the purchase and sale; in fact, it often takes many weeks, if not months, between the handshake and the deed. In that period between the agreement ...