The first bill arrives before the funeral flowers have wilted. Maybe it's the funeral home. Maybe it's the electric company, still billing a house with no one in it. You're the executor, so you reach for the nearest card and pay it. It feels like the decent thing to do. It also feels temporary, because the money will surely be sorted out later.

That card swipe is how the trouble starts. A year on, you may be holding a shoebox of receipts, a bank statement where your groceries sit beside your late mother's pension deposit, and a sibling asking, politely, where exactly the money went.

You may not be able to prove it, and the reason isn't dishonesty. You never built a wall between your money and the estate's.

The legal idea underneath: two people, not one

The law treats an estate as its own entity. When someone dies, their property doesn't become yours, even if you're the sole heir. It becomes the estate's, and you hold it as a fiduciary. A fiduciary has a duty to keep the estate's property separate from their own and to account for every dollar.

There's a name for the failure to do this: commingling. It means mixing a fiduciary's personal funds with the money they manage for someone else. It doesn't require theft, or even bad intent. A court looking at a messy account can't tell the difference between a careless executor and a dishonest one, so it tends to resolve the doubt against the person holding the money.

This is the reason professionals insist on a dedicated account. The account does more than store money. It writes the story for you, one transaction at a time, so you never have to reconstruct it from memory under pressure.

What an estate bank account actually is

It's an ordinary checking account, opened in the name of the estate, such as "Estate of Margaret A. Ellis, Jane Ellis, Executor." It has its own tax ID number, separate from the deceased's Social Security number and from yours.

The tax ID is called an EIN (Employer Identification Number). The IRS issues one to an estate for free. The online application takes a few minutes, and it's the same form (SS-4) businesses use. Beware of websites that charge a fee to do this for you. You don't need to pay anyone.

The EIN matters because the estate becomes a separate taxpayer. Interest, dividends, rent, or sale proceeds that arrive after the date of death belong to the estate, and they're reported under its EIN. If those payments keep flowing to your parent's Social Security number, you'll eventually be untangling mismatched tax forms.

Why the old account isn't enough

A common instinct is to keep using the deceased's checking account. Surprisingly often, that's not possible. Banks freeze or restrict a sole-owner account once they learn of the death, and the executor can't simply keep writing checks on it.

Even when you can reach the old account, it's the wrong tool. It carries the deceased's name and number, and it may still be tied to autopay charges, subscriptions, and scam attempts. A fresh account lets you decide which bills the estate pays, and nothing else gets through.

The estate account also solves a second problem: where does money go when it arrives? Refunds, final paychecks, insurance proceeds owed to the estate, a security deposit returned by a landlord. Each needs somewhere clean to land.

What the bank will ask for

Requirements vary by bank and state, so call ahead. Generally you'll need:

  • A certified copy of the death certificate
  • The court document naming you as executor, often called letters testamentary (or letters of administration if there was no will)
  • The estate's EIN
  • Your own government-issued ID

The court document is the one that can slow you down. In some places, the court takes weeks to issue letters after you file. That doesn't mean you can do nothing in the meantime, but it does mean you should not open or run an estate account on your own authority before the court has given it to you.

Paying yourself back

This is the part that surprises people. You can usually reimburse yourself for legitimate estate expenses you paid out of pocket, such as the funeral bill, but only if you can document them and your state allows it.

That's why the receipts matter more than the repayment. A reimbursement with a receipt, a date, and a note about what it was for is easy to defend. A vague transfer from the estate account to yours, a few months later, is the sort of thing a suspicious sibling or a judge will ask you to explain.

If you've already paid something from your own funds, don't panic. Keep the paperwork. Wait until the estate account holds funds and, ideally, until you've confirmed what your state requires. Some courts want approval or a note in the accounting first.

The tax filing you might not know about

Once the estate earns income, it may need its own income tax return, Form 1041. The general trigger is gross income of $600 or more during the tax year. That can happen quietly. A savings account with a decent balance, a few months of interest and some dividends can get an estate over the line.

Here the dedicated account pays you back twice. Every dollar of income sits under one EIN on one statement, and you hand your tax preparer a clean page instead of a reconstruction project.

(This is separate from the final personal return for the deceased and from any estate tax question. Those are different filings with different rules.)

Your next moves

None of these requires a lawyer to start, though a probate attorney can confirm your state's rules.

  • Stop paying estate bills from personal accounts, starting today. If you must advance a cost, such as a funeral deposit, photograph the invoice and the payment confirmation the same day and put them in one folder.
  • Apply for the EIN on the IRS website. Use only the official irs.gov application; it's free and typically done in one sitting. Write the number down and keep it with the estate's papers.
  • Call the bank and ask three questions. What do you need to open an estate account? Do you need letters in hand first? Is there a monthly fee or a minimum balance? Pick the bank that answers plainly.
  • Order a few extra certified death certificates before you go. Banks usually want an original, and they don't always hand it back.
  • Start a simple ledger the day the account opens. One line per transaction: date, amount, who it went to, why. Ten seconds each. It becomes the accounting you'll owe the court or your siblings later.

Where this leaves you

The heavy part of being an executor isn't any single task. It's the number of small decisions made while you're grieving, each one capable of being second-guessed later. Separating the money is the cheapest way to take most of those arguments off the table before they begin.

That's the logic behind Heirloom. When the list of accounts, documents, and obligations already lives in one organized place, the executor doesn't start by guessing what exists, who it belongs to, or where the receipts went. If you're planning ahead for your own family, or already inside this process for someone else's, you can see how it works at heirloom.lumenlabs.works.

The most useful thing you can do for the estate this week might be to open one plain checking account and keep your own wallet out of it.