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Dealing with your loved one’s rental agreement

If your loved one passed away while living in a rental property, you may have questions about what will happen to the space, and to their lease. Often the landlord will allow you to break the lease, but legally the estate becomes responsible for it.

When you inherit a house 

If you have inherited a house from a loved one, it can be amazing gift, but you will also have some important decisions to make. Starting with: Do you move in, do you rent it out, or do you sell?

Selling your loved one’s house

Selling the house of a loved one who has passed away can be very difficult. There are a lot of practical logistics to deal with, along with family issues and emotional complexity.

Loss is hard. Its vocabulary shouldn’t be.

We speak the specialized language of estates and funerals so you don’t have to.

Administrator

The person appointed by the court to handle the estate of someone who dies without a will.

The duties of an administrator are similar to those of an executor, but as there is no will to execute, he or she is named administrator and distributes assets according to a procedure dictated by state law.

Estate

The sum total of someone’s net worth, including all assets. From a legal standpoint, an estate is not simply everything the person owns, but the value of all of these assets minus any debts or other liabilities. Estates are calculated differently depending on their purpose.
For example, the taxable estate may include assets that are not in the probate estate.

Memorial

A service held to commemorate someone’s life. Memorials are generally considered distinct from funerals in that they are held without the body present and are not focused on the burial, although services where the urn with the loved one’s ashes is present are also called memorials. Traditionally, a funeral is a more formal service while memorials are often more unstructured.

To see the full glossary