When Someone Dies: The Financial Checklist

Updated August 4, 2026. Quick answer: in the first week almost nothing financial is urgent except the funeral contract and not closing accounts. Most of what feels urgent has a deadline measured in months, and the things that genuinely cannot be missed — the year-of-death RMD, the creditor window, the estate tax return — arrive later and quietly. This is the sequence, by when it actually matters. Every line links to the page that answers it.

Printable: this page is one column of plain lists with no interactive parts, so it prints as a checklist from any browser.

The first week

Two decisions here have money consequences that are hard to reverse. Everything else can wait.

• Work out who is signing for the funeral — the person who signs the contract can be personally liable, and that is not automatically the estate
• Ask for an itemised price list — the FTC Funeral Rule entitles you to one before you agree to anything
• Check veterans’ burial benefits — routinely unclaimed, and they have to be claimed at the time
• Report the death to Social Security — and understand the lump-sum death payment, which is small and time-limited
• Do not close accounts yet — the estate needs its own EIN and bank account before money moves anywhere

The one that costs the most: closing or emptying accounts before the estate exists. It creates a paper trail that has to be unwound later and can make a personal representative personally liable for money they no longer hold.

The first month

This is where the shape of the whole job is decided — whether probate opens at all, and who is responsible for what.

• Establish whether probate is needed at all — many estates never open one
• Check the small-estate threshold in the state — an affidavit can replace probate entirely below it
• Read the whole sequence once before starting it — the order of operations is what prevents personal liability
• Understand what the executor is personally on the hook for — paying the wrong creditor first is the classic trap
• Note the creditor claim window — it starts on a date and it closes on a date
• Run the deadline calculator — the dated sequence of filings and elections, computed

The first year

The deadlines with real teeth are in this block, and none of them announce themselves.

• Get the inherited-IRA election right — the 10-year rule, the annual-RMD overlay, and the beneficiary categories
• Take the year-of-death RMD if one is owed — the deadline does not move because someone died
• For a surviving spouse, choose the election deliberately — rollover and inherited IRA are not the same account and the choice is hard to undo
• Check whether Form 706 is due — it can be due even when no tax is owed, and portability depends on filing it
• File the estate’s own income tax return — Form 1041 is separate from the decedent’s final 1040
• Price the stepped-up basis before selling anything — the gain that survives the step-up is the part people miss
• Plan for the survivor’s tax cliff — joint to single brackets is a permanent change, not a one-year event
• Know what probate will cost in that state — statute-cited fee model, schedule and filing fee for all 51 jurisdictions

What this checklist does not do

It does not tell you who inherits — that is the will, or if there was none, the state’s intestacy statute. It does not price the job: use the probate cost calculator and the executor fee calculator for that. And it is not legal advice — where an estate is contested, insolvent, or spans two states, the sequence above is the part a lawyer will want you to have done, not a substitute for one.

The whole estate machine — documents, process, taxes, tools — is on the estate planning front door. Method: methodology. Mistakes: corrections.