You were named executor,
and here's the order it happens in.

How it was researched

Every source in the list was opened and read on September 13 and 14, 2026, and on September 14 every sentence carrying a citation marker was checked back against the page it cites, one claim at a time. A second adversarial pass on September 14 took the twelve claims a reader would act on hardest, the statutes, day counts, thresholds and dollar figures, opened each cited page again and tried to break the sentence, and spot-checked every row of both tables against the statute or agency page behind it. Federal rules come from the IRS's own pages and Publication 559, the FTC and CFPB consumer pages, USAGov, and the United States Code as published by Cornell's Legal Information Institute. State rules were read on the legislatures' and revenue agencies' own sites: California, Washington, Florida, Texas and Ohio for probate procedure, and the state tax agencies and statutes listed for estate and inheritance taxes. Where a page contradicted a MORTL guide, the statute won and the guide was flagged for correction: Florida's summary-administration limit rose from $75,000 to $150,000 under chapter 2026-57, approved April 29, 2026 and effective July 1, 2026. The first claim check changed the book in three places worth naming. Washington's estate tax exclusion is $3,076,000 for deaths from January 1 to June 30, 2026 and $3,000,000 only from July 1, so the flat $3,000,000 in the first draft was wrong. Kentucky's Class B rate runs 4% to 16% and Class C runs 6% to 16%, not one band for everyone outside Class A. And in Texas the executor who exercises the right to control disposition isn't personally liable for the cost of interment, which is the opposite of what the first draft said. The adversarial pass changed six more. The $30,000,000 combined exclusion figure came out, because neither IRS page states it: what the sources say is that the first spouse's estate can elect to pass the unused exclusion to the survivor. Washington's creditor window got the case the draft left out, a creditor you should have found and never served, who keeps 24 months even when you did publish. The federal payment-priority statute got its trigger back: 31 U.S.C. 3713 bites when the estate can't pay all its debts, so the flat claim that any distribution makes you liable was too broad. Medicaid recovery waits for the surviving spouse's death, which isn't the same as a claim against that spouse's estate, so that line was rewritten. The FTC sentence on how often a collector may call a relative was quoted out of order and is now quoted as the page has it. And the Illinois estate tax pages, which wouldn't load for the first draft, opened on the second try, so Illinois has its own row: a $4,000,000 exclusion and a return due nine months after death. The Form 1041 accounting-period rule was moved to Publication 559, which states it; the IRS's Form 1041 page calls the Form 7004 extension five months while Publication 559 calls it five and a half months, and the book now says so rather than picking one. The text was then audited line by line against MORTL's voice rules.

This book is general information about how executors' duties work, with examples drawn from a handful of states. It isn't legal or tax advice, and it can't tell you what your state requires: the deadlines, thresholds, forms and payment orders differ in all fifty states and the District of Columbia, and several change every year. The MORTL guide for your state carries the current rules, and a probate lawyer licensed in that state is the only person who can tell you how they apply to this estate. The book doesn't cover trust administration, guardianships, contested wills, estates with assets outside the United States, or the rules for ancillary probate when the person owned property in a second state. Every state figure here was read from that state's own statute or agency page in September 2026. Figures are current as of September 2026 and will move.

69 sources, each read on the date shown in the book.