Transcript
Probate is the court process that your assets go through if you die, and you own assets in your own name. This is the way most people own their own assets. So, the court is designed to identify the assets you owned at the time of your death. The court appoints someone to identify what those assets are and get appraised values for those assets. That person reports everything to the probate court.
The court gives your creditors a period of time to make claims against those assets and then ultimately the court supervises the distribution of those assets to your heirs at law so as a court process it has drawbacks. It can be time-consuming, it can be expensive, it can be cumbersome for your family: meaning they don’t get immediate access to your assets while the assets are going through that court process. And, it’s public! Everything that gets filed with a probate court is a public document. But that’s what probate is in a nutshell.
Most clients that we talk to want to make things as easy as possible for their family don’t want their family to go through probate and there’s ways to avoid it but by default if you own asset, you’re in your own name and you die your assets are going to go through that probate process
