The Executor Cost Planner
Nobody tells you what the estate owes every week while you wait for the court to let you act, or that the shortfall may come out of your own account.
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What’s inside
- One .xlsx workbook, six tabs: Start Here, The Dates, The Burn, The Runway, The First Meeting, and The Money Log. A worked estate and six logged payments are already in it; clear them and it is yours. Opens in Excel and in Google Sheets.
- The Dates: no date the sheet invented. Every one is typed in beside the name of the person who gave it to you, so in six weeks you still know whose word it was.
- The Burn: sixteen rows of what the estate owes, how often, when it is next due, whether it is essential, and who is paying it now. Every frequency becomes a weekly figure, and anything already overdue on the day of the death is marked and counted rather than quietly dropped.
- The Runway: the two clocks side by side, the cost of the wait, the gap, and twenty-six weeks marked OK, TIGHT or SHORT with your own dates beside the week they fall in. A guard row refuses to let you read a broken estimate.
- The First Meeting: fourteen questions for your attorney, shown or hidden by what is true of your estate, questions not answers. The Money Log: sixty rows of what you paid, when, whose money it was and which receipt, which is how you get repaid and how you show the family where the money went.
Who this is for
Being an executor is a race between two clocks, and only one of them is ever explained to you. The authority clock is how long until the court lets you act; until it lands you cannot get into most of the accounts. The burn clock is what the estate owes every week regardless: the mortgage does not pause, the insurer does not pause, the cat eats. Nobody hands you the second number, and it is the one that decides whether you end up paying for a death out of your own account.
The worked estate inside the file shows why the lever everyone reaches for first does not work: dropping every non-essential buys no extra weeks, because the big items are the essential ones. Better to know that before you spend a day canceling things.