E302 Minimum Estate Size for a Professional Executor

<p>What is the minimum estate size that a professional executor will accept? A few prospective clients have called asking, so we’ll review bank executor minimums, our minimums, and some exceptions.</p> <h2>Bank executor estate minimum size requirements</h2> <p><img class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-43269" src= "https://anthonyspark.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Bank-executor-estate-minimum-size-requirements-300x169.jpg" alt="Bank executor estate minimum size requirements" width="300" height="169" /></p> <p>Typically, <a href= "https://anthonyspark.com/e185-how-to-name-a-bank-as-your-executor/"> bank minimum sizes are high</a>. In New York, it has been as high as 5 million or 2 million liquid assets held with the institution. In most cases, the bank wants an estate with mostly liquid assets. It’s too much of a pain for them to deal with real estate, etc. They also want those liquid assets held at their bank. The bank generates fees and they get to have those assets invested in their products.</p> <h2>Our estate size requirements</h2> <p><img class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-43272" src= "https://anthonyspark.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Our-estate-size-requirements-300x169.jpg" alt="Our estate size requirements" width="300" height="169" /></p> <p>We generally try to fill the niche between folks who have an estate large enough to need our services, but not large enough to use a bank as an executor. Generally, we’ve set the bar as low as $250,000, and we do not have a liquidity requirement. However, we do want to make sure there are enough liquid accounts to fund estate expenses. Usually $50,000 in liquid assets is plenty to cover estate expenses.</p> <p>You’ll need to make sure the account with liquid funds does not have beneficiary designations. If you name a beneficiary on an account, that account will go directly to the beneficiary. This means the executor won’t have access to the account to pay for estate expenses.</p> <p>These requirements may not be hard for many clients to meet, but we have ru