When her uncle named Priya as executor of his estate, she was honored. They’d always been close. But when she found out he’d died with significant credit card debt and an unpaid medical bill, she panicked.
She called me convinced she was about to be on the hook for tens of thousands of dollars.
She wasn’t.
This is one of the most common fears I hear from executors, and it’s worth setting the record straight: when you serve as executor, you are stepping in to manage someone else’s estate — not adopting their financial obligations as your own.
Your job is to notify creditors that your loved one has passed, give them an opportunity to make a claim against the estate, and pay valid debts from whatever assets the estate holds. If the estate doesn’t have enough to cover everything, some debts simply go unpaid. The creditors absorb the loss. You walk away with the grief, not the bill.
What Priya did need to be careful about was the process. There are specific steps and timelines for notifying creditors and handling claims — and if those aren’t followed correctly, it can create problems for the estate and the beneficiaries. That’s where having guidance matters.
Priya worked through it methodically. She paid what the estate could cover, documented everything, and closed the estate cleanly.
At the end, she told me the thing that helped most was knowing, from the beginning, that she wasn’t personally at risk.
‘I could think clearly once I stopped being scared,’ she said.
That’s usually how it goes. Knowledge is the thing that lets you breathe.