Grandma’s House Is Still Paying for Netflix

It started with a credit card statement.

Karen was sitting at her mother’s kitchen table, going through a stack of mail that had been growing since the funeral. Most of it was exactly what she expected. Utility bills. Insurance statements. A few catalogs her mother had probably been receiving since 1987.

Then she noticed a charge for Netflix. She smiled. Her mother loved Netflix. A few lines later, there was Hulu. Then a meal delivery service. Then cloud storage. Then a $42 charge from a company Karen had never heard of.

By the time she reached the second page, she had found two magazine subscriptions, a gym membership her 82-year-old mother definitely wasn’t using, pest control, a monthly charitable donation, and something called “Premium Plus” that remained a complete mystery.

Her mother had been gone for six weeks. Her subscriptions hadn’t gotten the memo.

Welcome to the surprisingly persistent world of automatic payments.

One of the stranger realities of settling an estate is discovering just how many pieces of everyday life continue humming along after someone dies.

Companies don’t automatically know that a customer has passed away. Computer systems keep doing exactly what they were programmed to do. Bills get generated. Credit cards get charged. Memberships renew. Subscription boxes arrive faithfully on the porch.

Some of these charges are easy to recognize. Others require a little detective work.

A bank statement might show a recurring charge from a company name that looks nothing like the service the person actually used. A credit card may reveal subscriptions the family never knew existed. There may even be annual renewals that don’t appear until months into the administration of the estate.

Then there are the services that shouldn’t necessarily be canceled immediately.

The internet connection may still be needed while family members sort through the house. Lawn service might be more important than ever if the property will sit vacant for several months. Pest control, security monitoring, utilities, cloud storage, and other services may need to remain active while the estate is being handled.

Suddenly, canceling everything isn’t such a great plan.

The challenge is figuring out what should stay, what should go, and what nobody can identify in the first place.

Modern life has made that job considerably more interesting.

A generation ago, recurring household expenses were relatively easy to spot. Today, someone may have subscriptions tied to a checking account, several credit cards, PayPal, an app store account, or other digital payment methods. Some are billed monthly. Others appear quarterly or annually. And those little charges add up.

Ten dollars here and twenty dollars there may not look important individually, but an estate that remains open for months can continue paying for services nobody is using.

There can also be value hiding among those recurring accounts.

A membership may include benefits the family should know about. A travel account may contain rewards or points. A cloud storage subscription could be protecting years of family photographs and documents. A storage facility charge might be the first clue that there is an entire unit full of property somewhere across town.

That mysterious $89 charge isn’t always something to cancel. Sometimes it’s something worth investigating.

For attorneys and paralegals, this is one of those practical areas where a simple reminder can save clients a surprising amount of frustration. Executors are usually thinking about the big things first, and understandably so. Houses, investment accounts, debts, taxes, and court requirements tend to command attention.

Nobody walks into a probate attorney’s office worried about Grandma’s Netflix account. But eventually, all those small pieces of someone’s financial life have to be untangled too.

It is another reminder of just how much an executor is being asked to manage. They aren’t simply administering assets on a piece of paper. They’re shutting down, transferring, preserving, and reorganizing the financial footprint of an entire life.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, there may also be a probate bond that needs to get done.

That’s where Probate Bond Pros comes in.

We can’t tell you why Grandma apparently had three different streaming services or what she was ordering every month for $14.95, but we can make the bond process one less thing for you or your client to worry about.

Our process is designed to be simple, responsive, and fast, because nobody working through an estate needs another task that takes longer than it should.

Need a probate bond? Request yours HERE or give us a call at 727-748-2886
. With our two-hour guarantee, we’ll help you keep things moving while you tackle everything else hiding on that bank statement.

To your success,

Darren Vermost
The Bond Guy®