Guide
The Executor's Guide to Personal Property
Personal property is the part of an estate that takes an executor the longest and causes the most friction. What the job actually involves, in order, and where it stops.
Most guidance for executors covers the accounts, the property deeds, the tax filing and the paperwork. That side is well documented, has clear deadlines, and someone qualified will walk you through it. Then there is the house full of belongings — and on that, almost nobody tells you what to do.
It is the part of the job that takes the longest, generates the most family friction, and has the fewest rules to follow. It is also the part where an executor is least protected, because the decisions are discretionary and the people affected are relatives.
Your exposure is procedural, not financial
The risk in personal property is rarely that something valuable is mishandled. It is that an heir believes a decision was made without them. Nearly every dispute traces back to the same sentence: nobody asked me.
That makes the executor's protection almost entirely procedural. If every heir was asked, every answer was recorded, and every decision can be traced back to who made it and when, the outcome is defensible even where somebody dislikes it. Without that trail, a perfectly reasonable decision is indistinguishable from a unilateral one.
The order that saves the most time
- Secure before you sort. Empty houses lose things — to well-meaning relatives as often as anyone else. Photograph the rooms as they are, before anything moves. It takes an hour and it is the only record of the starting state you will ever get.
- Inventory what matters. Not everything: the objects that carry money or meaning. Photograph, locate, note condition, note a rough value.
- Identify what needs a professional. Anything where you are guessing at a number with real consequences — jewellery, art, instruments, collections. A valuation costs less than a contested division.
- Ask every heir, separately, before anyone meets. What they want and why. Privately, on their own time, with "no opinion" available as a real answer.
- Resolve the overlaps. Usually far fewer than expected — most objects are wanted by one person or by none.
- Decide, record, communicate. Including what was decided about the objects nobody wanted.
Steps 2 and 4 are the ones commonly run in the wrong order. Asking heirs what they want before there is an inventory produces a conversation about half-remembered objects, and it has to be run again once the facts exist.
The objects nobody wants
This is the larger half of the work and it gets no attention at all. Most of a house is not heirlooms — it is furniture, kitchenware, books, clothes. Sale, donation, house-clearance and disposal are all legitimate outcomes, and an executor who has recorded why each one was chosen will not be re-litigating it later.
One caution worth stating plainly: do not clear anything before every heir has been asked. The cost of storing a wardrobe for another month is trivial. The cost of having disposed of the one thing someone's daughter wanted is not recoverable at any price.
Distant heirs are a logistics problem
An heir abroad, or estranged, or simply slow to reply, is the single most common reason a personal-property division stalls — and the most common reason one gets reopened. Give them the same information everybody else has, in a form they can act on without being in the room, and give them a deadline. Someone who declines to respond after being properly asked is a very different position, both practically and in the eyes of the rest of the family, from someone who was never reached.
Where this stops
None of this is legal advice, and it does not touch your formal duties as executor — probate, filings, tax, creditors, or the interpretation of the will itself. Those vary by jurisdiction and belong with a notaire, solicitor or probate attorney. What is written here concerns the practical handling of belongings once those duties are being properly discharged by someone qualified to discharge them. If the two are in conflict, the legal position wins.
The articles below take each stage in turn — the checklist, the inventory, the heirs who have not answered, and how you know the work is finished.