How long can an executor take to execute a will?

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concernedfriend

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I had power of attorney for a year friend who died 6 months ago. He also wanted me to be executor as his two daughters who stood to inherit, literally hate each other and do not communicate. One lives in the UK and the other in Australia. The one in the UK used emotional pressure to persuade her father to make her executor. She is now claiming a considerable number of hours per week for " gardening, cleaning and decorating" the house prior to putting it on the market. No one seems to be monitoring the hours. I believe she will do this as long as possible as she is earning a decent income from the estate and reducing her sister's inheritance. Does the law put any limitations on the money earned or the time to market the property? What, if anything, can her sister do?
 
You seem to be based in the UK?
Was your deceased friend also resident in the UK?
If so then you may not get detailed advice here as this is primarily an Irish personal finance site.
 
Not to be rude, but is this any of your business? Your power of attorney lapsed when your friend died. Your only possible interest in the matter now would be a beneficiary under the will. Are you a beneficiary under the will? If not, while you may have strong views about what the executor is or isn't doing, there may not be anything you can do about it — you have no standing.

But, to answer the question in general terms:
  1. There's no set time within which an executor must complete the administration of an estate. There can't be, because estates vary in complexity, and wills vary in what they require to be done. An estate can, quite legitimately, still be in administration decades after the testator's death.
  2. But the executor is expected to proceed with reasonable dispatch. If they don't, the beneficiaries can go to court to try to get the executor replaced, or to get other orders to expedite the process.
  3. Traditionally there's an "executor's year"; the courts will be reluctant to intervene on the grounds of delay until a year has passed from the appointment of the executor. But that's not a hard-and-fast rule.
  4. An executor is entitled to reclaim expenses incurred from the estate, but they are not entitled to pay themselves for their own time and effort unless the will expressly allows for this. A standard will will usually include a clause allowing a professional (e.g. a solicitor, an accountant) who is appointed as executor to charge their usual professional fees to the estate, but it won't allow a family member/beneficiary who acts as executor to pay themselves out of the estate for the time/effort they expend on dealing with the estate. Obviously, we don't know what this particular will says about that. But if I were a beneficiary under this will, I'd be looking at the will to see if there is anything in it to justify the executor paying herself in the way described. Just sayin'.
 
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Based on my experience, a normal will takes about a year to go through everything from start to the very finish, (the final tax clearance cert). An executor is entitled to reasonable costs, within certain rules, and also those costs should be made clear as part of the final settlement of value. Hence it should become clear how much this person is taking.
 
Peanuts20 said:
An executor is entitled to reasonable costs
Click to expand...
To be clear, absent a clause in the will allowing it, the executor is not entitled to charge the estate for their own time and effort. "Reasonable costs" here means costs that the executor has incurred in paying other people. So if the estate includes a house and the executor hires a cleaner to clean the house, the amount paid to the cleaner is an expense that can be reclaimed from the estate. But if the executor cleans the house themselves, they can't claim an hourly rate for that (even if its less than the hourly rate they would have paid a hired cleaner).
 
The original poster seems to be UK based and the deceased may also have been so anything posted here based on Irish regulations may not be relevant to the original query.
 
In this regard I'm fairly sure that the UK situation is not materially different from the Irish situation.

Obviously if the beneficiaries of the estate want to the the matter further they'll need legal represention, and if if there are any material points on which Irish and UK law differs they will find that out them.
 
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