Not pay deceased family members bills

[Hound456]

A family member has died and my siblings and I are the only relatives they had.
We have been left a house which has sold but we are waiting for probate to be granted so the sale goes through.
I contacted relatives energy supplier and explained they were deceased , nobody is living at the property but correspondence could be sent to me. I was told outstanding bills had to be settled when probate was granted.
I've since had a quarterly bill but they are asking for payment.
It's not loads of money but I would prefer not to have to pay it from my own money.
I've argued that I was told bills would be issued on probate being granted ,this seems to have changed.
What I suppose I'm asking is can they do this? Or are the company trying it on?They are saying account is in my name but I never agreed to that. When letters come they are addressed to my deceased family members estate c/o me. Can anyone offer any advice ?
TIA

O.P. Is there a Will? If so, who is named as Executor? If not, who has taken on the role of Administrator, and have they applied for, and been granted, Letters of Administration by the Probate Registry, to enable them to wind up the Estate?

There are different amounts for the amount of savings you can hold before having to get probate with different banks, iirc Nationwide is £50k and National Savings (premium bonds) is only £5k so very little but OPs relative has a property so probate will likely be needed anyway

Try reading the OP properly. I find it very helpful.

No you can do probate yourself. It saves thousands. It’s nothing too bad. Just loads of form filling. The forms are written in normal English (no technical jargon).
I am a TA, no legal experience, and I did my father’s probate myself. I saved many thousands of pounds by just filling in forms.
You will get loads of solicitors on here saying you cannot do it by yourself but you absolutely can.

Don't pay, any bills come out of the estate.
I've dealt with both my grandad and late aunt's debts, never paid a penny of my own money to them

@Hound456

even with probate company OVO send debt collectors it’s a disgrace.

Probate takes far too long !!

assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1075225/PA1A_0422_citizen_save.pdf

We just filled this in, I can’t remember the fee but it wasn’t expensive.

Yes it probably is quite easy to do probate yourself and save money but I chose not to do that as executer for both my separated parents, for my DM as it was being shared between 7 of us and I would have got no thanks for all the extra work, likewise I also chose to use a solicitor when DF died as I then also would get no thanks after a lot of work and DB just collecting his share and doing fuck all so solicitors fees were paid out of the estates and saved me the work

All that “extra work” took me about two hours. I certainly wasn’t going to spend thousands of ££ of my parents’ hard earned money to have it done for me. There were about a million better ways of spending it.

If affairs are relatively straightforward, it’s not a major deal to do probate yourself.
If you do feel the need of a solicitor, though, do get more than one quote! Dh and a BiL were executors for an aunt - BiL’s quote for the probate end - in a small N Yorkshire town - was double what dh found in a fairly affluent town in the SE. TBH I’d have expected it to be the other way around.

OK Probate can be done by yourself, its pretty straight forward - where is gets tricky is if there is any IHT to pay. So you list out everything they owned (It doesn't have to be 100% accurate at this point as it can be adjusted later) and input to HMRC to calculate any IHT (note if the house is inherited by children of the deceased the IHT limit is higher) you can then transition into completing info for probate and submit probate - there is a cost to this again payable by the estate) they then consider and grant if no issues. I got probate in 14 days but my Dad was super organised and was mid house sale so we had special circumstances. I submitted everything and was then getting pressure from buyer (he had exchanged but not completed) so I phoned the probate office and managed to get the head honcho who looked us up and pushed it through for us the next day - we still had "fines" to pay on the house contract as he missed completion (still say buyers solicitor was a bitch for enforcing this, we just told all the neighbours!!) but it got done really quickly. The trick with the probate office was to call at 8am as very few people in and more likely to be seniors or they are included in the phone rota at that time. I did luck out on that one.

If there is a property involved you MUST have probate or equivalent. It sounds like there is a will here though.

I can def recommend speaking to bereavement teams rather than customer services as I found all bar the local council pension scheme excellent and we even got a free ride on the Water bill for 2 or 3 months as the place was empty and we were just house clearing.

In terms of NOT having probate and sorting through things, its tricky if you are dealing with investments unless you have a friendly solicitor who will notarise things for you (not a family member). Each of the finance companies have differing limits they will release without probate/letters of admin, and the cost of getting things copied and signed can easily amount to the cost of probate and is alot more hassle even if there is a wait on probate. Shares are infact the worst thing to handle outside of probate, £100 worth of shares and they want double copies and sign off in several places plus an indemnity insurance costing 30 quid per share type held (ie each company). I did challenge this and got a 50% refund but was still peed off with them as it's just not necessary with all the other due diligence done.

Why post incorrect nonsense? You might wish that were true, but it simply isn't.

When probate is granted the Executor of the Will should collect the assets, deal with paperwork (notifications) then settle all debts tax and expenses (from the estate) before distributing the residue among the beneficiaries.

If my parents had been that bothered about their money they had plenty of opportunity to spend it, we are certainly spending all ours so hopefully none gets left

Probate takes far too long !!

Not sure about now but when I OH died at the start of lockdown 1 we had the probate through before the funeral! It took us about half an hour to complete the form on line and we had it through within a week even though they were saying 8-10 weeks.

This

debts do not due either the. If there is money /estate etc

@TightDiamondShoes

I think we’ve all read these awful stories where eg a widow is asked to obtain the signature of her deceased husband to allow x, y and z.

this was me. Dh had died. I wanted to get his name off joint account - I explained that he had died

i was given a firm /signature and To get his consent to be taken off the account from the bank

Sorry about your loss

As you are c/o on the bills the debt is not in your name but still the deceased relative. But ask them to disconnect the supply as property is empty otherwise you’ll be paying £30 a month and probate normally takes a year so that’s nearly £400 wasted and more if it takes longer.

Sorry for your loss. And watch out for Vodaphone.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jul/28/sadmin-mother-death-vodafone

Just wow some companies have no scruples

In which case there is an executor who will be dealing with this, not a random beneficiary who is ringing up saying send me the bill.....

I have been an executor, all reasonable costs can be taken from the estate, as such i had access to bank accounts etc to settle bills, not least the cost of the funeral, everything documented etc i took bills into the bank and they paid them from the account - all before probate.

Probate can take years in a contested or complex Will, its unreasonable to expect any company to bare that cost.

The OP doesn't mention any executor nor if there is a Will, there maybe neither there maybe both, he/she hasn't come back.

I also did the Probate, a bit time consuming but dead easy.

My mother died three months ago and once we informed her bank, her accounts were frozen and we no longer have access to them so cannot pay any outstanding bills. The funeral director was paid by the bank but that is all.

It’s complicated for us as we had rented out mums house when she went into a care home and having just renewed the lease, cannot sell it until next February. Money can be paid into the frozen account so the rental money continues going in but any maintenance bills can only be covered if they go through the property agent who deducts the bill from that months rental. This has worked well until the boiler broke last month and the plumber used by the property company could not fix it due to difficulty getting parts. As the tenant works from home and has a young child, we did not want to leave without heating or hot water for weeks while we sorted things out so I ended up paying almost £400 from my account to the boiler manufacturer who were able to fix it. I am not an executor, my brother and sister have that job thankfully so we have agreed that as soon as probate comes through and mums money is released, I will be repaid for the repair before the money is shared out.

Extra complications in getting mums tax forms up to date ( tax owed on rental income) mean that the probate forms have yet to be completed!

Yes, Vodaphone are shocking.
So too are HMRC. We got a horrible phone call from them several months after our son died. Apparently we should have completed his tax returns on his behalf and they were going to fine us/him £100 for late return. We had sent them a death certificate at the time and nobody told us we would have to complete further tax returns.
Tax returns were certainly not at the forefront of our minds at the time.

Gosh that sounds terrible and how were you supposed to know this and sorry for your loss

Why post telling her she’s wrong when we’ve already had another 5 pages of people telling her the same thing? I think she knows by now.