When someone dies with a bank account in their name alone, banks freeze it. You need a court order to access the money, leaving families to pay bills out of pocket. Jerry Taylor explains how a living trust lets your successor trustee access accounts immediately instead.
If you were to die having a bank account in your name and no one else's, the bank is going to freeze that account and nobody in your family will be able to get into it. No one would be able to pay the bills that need to be paid till a court issued an order appointing a representative for your estate and allowing access to that account. So to pay your bills, people would have to come out of their own pocket until the freeze on that account was lifted by a court order. Banks find out about deaths in any number of ways, but the most common is that the funeral home will notify Social Security And Social Security will immediately notify any banks that come up under your Social Security number. One of the easiest ways to get around this ever happening is to create a living trust and put your bank accounts in the name of the trust. Once you've done that, on the date of your death, your successor trustee, and that's the person you name to be in charge of everything when you're gone, will have immediate access to those accounts.
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