Vampire-Proof Your Estate

What if the scariest part of probate isn’t the paperwork—but the creditors waiting to drain an estate dry? We pull back the curtain on practical, legal tools that keep wealth intact, from the first filing to the final distribution. Jane and Haley explain how to start the clock with a proper notice to creditors, why a thorough inventory creates leverage and clarity, and how a clean estate bank account shields you from commingling risks and messy accounting. If you’ve ever wondered how claims actually get processed—or challenged—this conversation gives you the step-by-step playbook.

We dive into the fine print of creditor strategy: spotting invalid or mistaken claims, using North Carolina procedures to object, and negotiating unsecured debts for less when quick payment makes sense. You’ll hear where the line gets drawn with secured debts like mortgages and car loans, and why keeping those payments current is non-negotiable if you want to avoid foreclosure or repossession during estate administration. We also share how non-estate funds, including life insurance proceeds, can preserve key assets so you don’t lose the family home or a vital vehicle while claims are pending.

Finally, we talk prevention: the smartest way to avoid creditor chaos is to limit what goes through probate in the first place. With the right mix of trusts, beneficiary designations, and lady bird deeds, many assets can pass outside probate and stay beyond most creditors’ reach. Whether you’re serving as a personal representative or planning ahead for your family, you’ll come away with clear, actionable steps to protect assets, reduce stress, and finish administration with fewer surprises. If you found this helpful, follow the show, share it with someone who’s facing probate, and leave a review to help others find these tools.

Chapters

• 0:18 Spooky Stakes: Why Estates Bleed
• 1:09 Start The Clock: Notice To Creditors
• 2:22 Inventory, Sales, And Estate Accounts
• 3:00 Objecting To Bad Or Wrong Claims
• 4:02 Negotiating Debts And Knowing Limits
• 4:43 Keep Secured Debts Current
• 5:34 Use Non‑Estate Funds To Preserve Assets
• 6:49 Best Defense: Plan To Avoid Probate

Transcript

Jane Dearwester: 0:10

Hi, I'm Jane Dear wester with McIntyre Elder Law here today with my colleague Haley Matson. Hi, how are you? I'm good. Yeah, hey, we are here to talk about some spooky things here. We're entering spooky season and we're talking about the way that your estate or any estate could be drained, or we kind of have this vampire theme that there could be vampires looking out or trying to hone in and get all the assets out of your estate to bleed out your estate. So we're going to talk today about ways to avoid that, to preserve estate assets and avoid all the spooky things that can happen as you're working through an estate administration process. So we're just kind of going to go back and forth. I'm going to start by talking about at the beginning of probate or estate administration, what's really important is to publish what's called a notice to creditors. So this is something we want to get filed in the probate estate as soon as possible because it starts the clock ticking. It's a public notice that's run in a local newspaper that says, hey, anybody who has a claim against this person who's deceased, now's your time to bring it. And here's your deadline to bring it. So we want to get that clock ticking as soon as possible so that we can move forward with the estate administration and again uh limit the amount of creditors that can come in and make claims against the estate. And I will flip over to Haley for the next one on our list.

Haley Matson: 1:49

Yeah. The creditors are true blood-sucking vampires. They really are. But another way that you can kind of avoid that or at least kind of plan ahead is doing your inventory. So when you open probate, you're required to do an inventory anyway. But even before that, once someone passes, if you can just do a quick pass-through of their house, figure out their assets, their personal property, maybe find some stuff that nobody in the family wants. All of that could be sold to help stave off these creditors. So that could always be something that you do. But either way, you just want a really good idea of kind of what's going through the probate estate and what creditors may be able to take from you. Um, it's also really important for you to go ahead and open an estate bank account. That's gonna make sure that estate funds are not commingled with like your own funds. That's gonna keep them separated and protect yourself from any of these bloodsucking creditors that are gonna come through. Absolutely.

Jane Dearwester: 2:52

Uh another way, again, to protect the probate estate and the decedent's assets is you have the capacity, if you're the personal representative or executor of an estate, to object to claims that are invalid. So we see this, I don't know what the percentage of time is, but we do see it often where there are claims filed. Maybe the decedent's name is John Smith, and guess what? There's more than one John Smith in the world. So we could get claims against John Smith, but it wasn't our John Smith. So there is a procedure to process statutes, laws in place in North Carolina that give us a platform to object or to challenge invalid claims. Either the whole claim itself is invalid or the amount alleged in the claim is invalid. So again, look at those carefully. Don't just receive those claims and assume you've got to pay them. You can question those and even challenge those and have them set aside.

Haley Matson: 3:54

Yeah, something else that I just thought of is that there's a lot of times where if you offer to pay one of those creditors like 500 bucks in cash on a $5,000 outstanding bill, sometimes they'll take it. You can always offer cash up front or try to negotiate with them as well. I mean, I can't guarantee it'll be successful, but I mean, I just saw that in the case that I had not that long ago that they look way cheaper.

Jane Dearwester: 4:19

Yeah, that's negotiating the claims. That's a very good, very good point. Negotiating the claims down. Hey, anything's negotiable. All they can say is no. And if you don't ask, they're definitely not going to offer to let you pay less. True, true.

Haley Matson: 4:35

But one thing that I don't think really counts for that is secured debts, mortgages, car payments, anything with collateral and a title, any money you owe to those folks, they usually won't take less than what the decedent has already been paying. But you, as executor or administrator, you want to make sure that those are kept up to date and continually paid. Because if they're not paid, that's when foreclosures and repossessions can happen. Creditors are not afraid of foreclosing on a house in the middle of a probate estate. Likewise, they're not afraid of repossessing a car that hasn't been paid on just because probate is open. So you want to really make sure that those are paid up and that you know who you're paying and that you have all of that under control as well.

Jane Dearwester: 5:25

That's right. Uh, another one that we have on our list here is as the personal representative or executor, if you want to preserve assets like the home, vehicles, or kind of any other assets that you can use non-estate funds or even like life insurance proceeds to make payments to preserve those assets so that they can't be drawn in to probate. North Carolina is a uh limited recourse state. So creditors can only challenge and attach claims to the probate estate. But if the probate estate is insufficient to satisfy the claims, the law allows you to pull in non-estate assets or jointly held property to satisfy creditors. So if you don't want creditors, again, the blood-sucking creditors to come in, you've got to make a plan to protect those assets with other funds that maybe pass outside of probate and aren't part of probate estate, maybe there are use and maybe available to the executor, PR, family members to preserve those estate assets.

Haley Matson: 6:40

Yeah, absolutely. And I think one of the final things that you know we want to say is that a way to avoid creditors in a probate estate is to first of all avoid going to probate. You can do that through hiring an estate planning attorney and getting that done sooner rather than later. An estate planning attorney will help you structure your assets, plan your estate, figure out which vehicles to open, maybe a trust, maybe a ladybird deed, to keep everything that's important to you outside of probate. Anything that passes outside of probate typically is not going to be subject to most creditor claims. Like Jane said, there are some things that they might try to reach, but they may not be successful. And for the most part, they're protected. So come see an estate planning attorney like Jane and I at McIntyre Elder Law, and we can look through your estate and your assets, and we can create a plan together to keep those assets out of probate and out of the vampire creditors.

Jane Dearwester: 7:43

That's all right. Thank you so much for joining me today, Haley. We look forward to hearing from you all soon if you need help with probate or avoiding probate.

Haley Matson: 7:51

Yes.

Jane Dearwester: 7:52

Sounds good.