What Executors Must Do in the First 30 Days: A Calm, Complete Checklist

If you have just been named executor — or you suspect you are about to be — the first thing to understand is that the first 30 days are about triage, not administration. You do not yet have court authority. You cannot sell anything, close accounts, or distribute belongings. What you can and must do is preserve: keep the house safe, keep the insurance alive, keep the bills from compounding, and keep the documents from scattering. Everything else can wait.

Families in this window tend to make two opposite mistakes. The first is paralysis — doing nothing for months while grief runs its course, during which the vacant house deteriorates, the homeowner's policy quietly lapses, and mortgage arrears stack up. The second is overreach — emptying the house, divvying up jewelry, cashing checks, or listing the property before anyone has authority to act. Both create problems that cost real money and real family goodwill to unwind.

This checklist is ordered by urgency, not by category. Some items genuinely cannot wait a week; others can comfortably wait three. I have organized it around what I see go wrong in actual Southern California estates, where the most valuable asset is almost always the home and the most expensive early mistakes almost always involve that home.

A note on my lane: I am a probate real estate specialist, not an attorney. Several items below have legal deadlines or legal consequences, and where they do, I will say so and tell you to confirm specifics with your probate attorney. If you take only one action from this entire article, make it the attorney consultation in week two.

Secure the home first. Within the first 72 hours, walk the property, confirm every door and window locks, and strongly consider re-keying — you have no idea how many keys exist or who holds them: neighbors, cleaners, contractors, an ex-partner, a wandering relative. Re-keying is inexpensive insurance against both theft and family conflict. If the home will be vacant, set lights on timers, arrange for someone to collect mail and newspapers daily, and ask a trusted neighbor to call you about anything unusual.

Locate the will and any trust documents. Check the home office, the file cabinets, the safe, and ask the decedent's attorney if you know who that is. Do not open a safe deposit box without understanding the bank's rules — access after death is restricted, and your attorney can guide the process. California law generally directs the custodian of a will to lodge it with the superior court within 30 days, so finding it early matters.

Order death certificates — more than you think you need. Banks, insurers, the mortgage servicer, the county, and others will each want certified copies. Ten is a sensible starting order for an estate with a house; you can always order more, but waiting on a reorder stalls everything downstream.

While you are in the house, also sweep for time bombs hiding in the paperwork: anything from a court, a lender, the county, or an insurance company gets opened and photographed to the attorney pile the day you find it. A foreclosure notice, an unpaid property tax installment, or a lapsed-policy letter discovered in week one is a manageable task; the same envelope discovered in month four is an emergency.

Care for what is living and perishable: pets need homes immediately, refrigerators need emptying, plants and pools need tending. It sounds trivial next to legal matters, and it is precisely the stuff that creates squalor, odors, and damage if ignored for three weeks while everyone focuses on paperwork.

Here is the single most expensive oversight I see in probate estates: the homeowner's insurance policy quietly becoming worthless. Standard homeowner's policies are written for owner-occupied homes, and most contain vacancy provisions that reduce or eliminate coverage after the home sits empty for a defined stretch — often 30 to 60 days. Separately, the named insured is now deceased, which raises its own coverage questions. A vacant, uninsured house in an estate is a catastrophe waiting for a pipe to burst.

Call the insurance carrier within the first week. Tell them the insured has died, that you are the person handling the estate, and ask three questions: Is the policy currently in force? What does the vacancy clause say? What do you need from me to keep coverage active during probate? Many carriers will continue or convert coverage; some will require a vacant-home policy from a specialty market. Vacant-home coverage costs more — accept that. It is dramatically cheaper than an uninsured loss.

While you are on insurance, sweep for the other policies: life insurance (beneficiaries can typically claim directly, outside probate), auto insurance on vehicles now parked indefinitely, umbrella policies, and any mortgage protection coverage. Log every policy number and contact. Life insurance proceeds with a named living beneficiary generally bypass the estate entirely — those beneficiaries can start claims now.

Document the property's condition in the same week. Walk every room with your phone and take thorough photos and video — contents, condition, valuables, everything. This protects you twice: it is your evidence for the insurance carrier if something happens, and it is your defense if a family member later claims something disappeared on your watch. Executors get accused of exactly that more often than anyone likes to admit, and a date-stamped video taken in week one ends those arguments before they begin.

Find out where the mortgage stands before anything else financial. Call the servicer, explain the death, and ask for the loan status: current or delinquent, the monthly amount, and whether any notice of default has been recorded. Federal rules generally allow successors in interest to communicate with the servicer and require servicers to have processes for exactly this situation. If the loan is delinquent, tell your attorney immediately — California's nonjudicial foreclosure timeline moves on a fixed clock that does not pause for probate, and early action preserves options.

Keep essential payments flowing: mortgage if the estate can manage it, property insurance, utilities at levels that protect the home (power for security and climate moderation, water if landscaping or fire considerations require it). If you advance personal funds for these, keep meticulous receipts — properly documented expenses of preserving estate property are generally reimbursable from the estate, but confirm the mechanics with your attorney before spending significant sums.

Do not pay general creditors yet. This surprises people: the credit cards, medical bills, and personal loans should not be paid out of sympathy or a desire for tidiness in week two. Creditor claims follow a formal process with statutory priorities, and if the estate turns out to be insolvent, paying the wrong creditor early can create personal liability. Collect every bill, log it, and hand the stack to your attorney.

Stop the outflows you can: cancel subscriptions, streaming services, gym memberships, and recurring charity drafts. Notify Social Security of the death — funeral homes often do this, but verify — because benefits paid after death must be returned, and the clawback is cleaner when handled promptly. Watch the decedent's bank account for auto-payments and direct deposits, but do not move or withdraw funds; the account will be handled properly once you have authority.

By the second week, you should be interviewing probate attorneys. Bring the will, a death certificate, your rough asset and debt list, and your questions. A good probate attorney will tell you within an hour whether the estate even needs full probate — smaller estates and certain asset mixes qualify for simplified procedures — and what the realistic timeline and fee structure look like. California sets statutory probate fees as a percentage of the estate, so fee structures are more comparable across attorneys than in most legal fields.

Choose someone who does probate as a core practice, not occasionally. The mechanical parts of probate are unforgiving about technical defects — a petition bounced for a formatting or notice error costs you a multi-week hearing cycle. Volume practitioners simply make fewer of those errors. Ask how many probates they handle per year, who in the office actually does the work, and how they prefer to coordinate with the real estate agent when the house sells.

Once retained, the attorney prepares and files the Petition for Probate. Filing starts the official clock: the court assigns a first hearing date, typically six to eight weeks out, and the required notices go out by mail and newspaper publication. From your side, the attorney will need accurate names and addresses for all heirs and beneficiaries — start confirming those now, including the relatives nobody has spoken to in years. Hunting for a current address in month four delays everyone.

If there is no will, the same conversation happens with one difference: the court will appoint an administrator according to a statutory priority list (spouse, children, and so on), and California's intestacy rules will determine who inherits. Families sometimes need to decide which sibling will serve — decide it around a kitchen table if you possibly can, because competing petitions are an expensive way to resolve a question a conversation could have settled.

You will eventually file a formal Inventory and Appraisal with the court, but the working version starts now. Create a simple spreadsheet with four tabs: real property, financial accounts, personal property of value, and debts. Populate it from the mail — thirty days of a decedent's mail is a nearly complete map of their financial life. Statements, premium notices, dividend checks, and collection letters will tell you about accounts no one in the family knew existed.

For the house, gather the documents a sale or transfer will eventually need: the deed (or at least the county records reference), recent property tax bills, the mortgage statement, any HOA contacts and account status, and records of major improvements. If you cannot find the deed, do not panic — title records are public and a title company or agent can pull them — but knowing how title was held matters early, because a home in joint tenancy or in a trust may not be a probate asset at all. Your attorney will confirm what is actually in the estate.

For personal property, resist the urge to distribute. Heirloom jewelry, art, collections, tools, and furniture should stay put and stay photographed until there is authority and a plan. The fastest way to poison sibling relationships is for items to leave the house informally in the first month. The standard I recommend: nothing leaves except perishables and items needed for the funeral, and anything that must move gets documented and communicated to all heirs.

Note anything requiring special handling: firearms (transfer rules apply — ask your attorney), vehicles parked on public streets, storage units with rent due, business interests, cryptocurrency, and anything that looks valuable and portable. Valuable-and-portable items are the ones that vanish; secure them first, ideally with a witness, and log where they went.

By weeks three and four, the home should shift from secured to stabilized — set up to sit safely for the months of administration ahead. Arrange recurring yard maintenance; an overgrown lawn is the universal signal of a vacant house, visible to burglars and code enforcement alike. Set the irrigation appropriately, schedule someone to run the taps and flush toilets every few weeks, and in our Southern California climate, keep brush and debris managed with fire season in mind.

Walk the home looking for slow killers: roof stains, water heater age and drip pans, signs of pests, trees touching the structure. You are not renovating — you are preventing the five-hundred-dollar problem from becoming the fifteen-thousand-dollar problem during month six. Small preventive repairs to protect estate property are generally legitimate expenses; keep invoices and clear them with your attorney if they are substantial.

Decide on a checking cadence and put it on a calendar: who physically visits the house, how often, and what they verify (no leaks, no break-ins, mail handled, systems running). Weekly is right for most homes. Some insurance policies for vacant homes actually require periodic inspections — another reason the week-one insurance call matters.

This is also the right moment for a first conversation with a probate-experienced real estate agent, even though listing is months away. An early walkthrough answers questions the whole family is quietly asking — what is the house realistically worth, what should we fix versus leave alone, what will the sale process look like under the authority we expect — and it lets the cleanout, repair, and pricing plan be ready the day Letters issue instead of starting from zero. The consultation should cost nothing; mine never do.

The administrative checklist above will protect the estate's money. The communication habits in this section will protect something harder to replace: the family. Executors are rarely sued over outcomes; they are sued — or simply resented for a decade — over silence. The fix is boring and completely effective: regular, written, factual updates to all heirs, whether or not they ask.

Send a short email at the end of weeks one, two, and four: here is what I have done, here is what is next, here is what I need from you. Keep the tone administrative and the contents factual. You are not asking permission — you do not need it for preservation actions — but you are eliminating the information vacuum in which suspicion grows. The sibling who feels informed almost never becomes the sibling who hires a lawyer.

When a sibling pushes for speed — and one usually does — answer with the process, not with friction: here is the checklist, here is what the attorney says we can and cannot do yet, here is the date the next step unlocks. Process answers feel impersonal in the best way; they convert 'you are stalling' into 'the timeline is the timeline,' which is an argument nobody can have with you personally.

Keep every record from day one: receipts, mileage, photos, emails, call logs with the mortgage servicer and insurer. A simple folder structure — Property, Financial, Legal, Communications — set up in the first week will save you genuine misery at accounting time, a year from now, when you must reconstruct everything you did. The executors who suffer at the end are the ones who kept records in a shoebox and a memory.

Finally, pace yourself. You are doing demanding administrative work while grieving, and the process ahead is a marathon measured in months. The first 30 days are the steepest part precisely because they are front-loaded with deadlines — after this month, the cadence slows, the attorney carries the legal weight, and your job becomes steady stewardship. Get the items on this list done, and you will have earned the right to breathe.

For the readers who skimmed to the end — and grieving people are allowed to skim — here is the entire month in one list, in priority order. Print it, tape it inside a cabinet at the house, and cross items off. Anything with legal teeth should be confirmed with your probate attorney; anything involving the property is the part I personally help families with every week.

A realistic word about capacity, because the list above assumes an executor with time and steadiness that grief does not always allow. Every item here can be delegated except the responsibility itself: a sibling can manage the mail and yard, a neighbor can do the weekly walk, the attorney's office can chase the death certificates, and an agent like me can carry the entire property workstream — insurance questions flagged, vendors scheduled, condition documented. Executors who delegate early and keep a simple log of who-owns-what finish the first month tired but on track. Executors who try to be the hero of every line item burn out by week three, and the estate inherits their exhaustion. Build your small team in week one; it is not weakness, it is administration.

If you find yourself stuck on any single item — an insurer that will not give straight answers, a mortgage servicer threatening dates, a sibling emptying drawers — do not let one stuck item stall the whole list. Escalate it: to the attorney for legal teeth, to me for anything touching the house, and keep moving on everything else. Momentum in the first month sets the tone for the entire administration.