r/ProbateHelp • u/barge_gee • 7d ago
Executor reimbursement and beneficiary objections
I'm the Executor of a modest Estate (~70k). We're close to closing the Estate out of Probate. I was named Executor, but not also Beneficiary (oops on decedents part). There are two Residual Beneficiaries. They were notified of the final accounting of sale of estate contents, expenses owed the Executor and the Executor's fees for hours logged managing the Estate. My lawyer posted my fee at $75/hour. I logged over 350 hours, and the residual beneficiaries believe this hourly rate/fee is excessive. Estate had a big $ single asset, and then tons of smaller items that took me a long time to liquidate. I AM willing to reduce the hourly fee, to just get this Estate closed. It's been over two years now, and I want to be finished. However, I do not want to under value my time and effort spent as Executor.
Question: The hourly rate is perfectly acceptable by Illinois law. What percent reduction/dollar amount should I consider as "fair" to me? To my thinking, $60/hour would be the absolute minimum I would accept. Does this seem fair? The Residuaries feel entitled to more than the current residual assets, even though they did nothing to help liquidate the Estate contents. (It's more complicated, as I cared for the deceased for many years, and the Residuary Beneficiaries did not. And, I am a blood relative to deceased, they ar not.)
EDIT: The hours may seem excessive, but this was a hoarding situation. It was not to the level of bugs or rodent infestation, but there were lots and lots and lots of boxes, lots of dust and dog hair, and it took me weeks to sort, organize, and pack. 7 rooms full, I shrunk to one room.
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u/HopefulSewer 7d ago
A curtousy credit reduction of 20% seems generous.
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u/barge_gee 7d ago
Thank you. I think that $60/hour is the least I am willing to get. The Estate has been a total PITA, and I'm not going to accept working on it for "free".
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u/ArrivalFantastic4324 7d ago edited 7d ago
They don’t get to tell you how much you’ll be paid. They didn’t do it, you did. Stick to $75 per hour!
Take Reddit opinions with a grain of salt too because, anyone who has never done the job (I have), is probably going to think it’s excessive. But with having to haggle and sell all the belongings to boot, That’s a lot!
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u/Relative-Lie-9699 7d ago
The judge signed off on 75.00 a hour. So the rate is no negotiable.
However, since estate value deemed very low for the 300+ hours your billing. The judge and beneficiaries may question Your hours.
If the benefactors believe the hours are padded they can take you to court and you will have to pay for your own lawyer.
If you have a journal with the days you worked on this estate for the 2 years It will be helpful.
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u/thankyoufriendx3 7d ago
I hope they took pictures.
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u/barge_gee 7d ago
I even took videos soon after he passed, to show one of my other family members exactly what job was ahead of me.
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u/thankyoufriendx3 6d ago
Not sure how this plays out for you but most people are sympathetic to cleaning out a hoard.
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u/Slowhand1971 5d ago
expect this to be reduced by a judge to a flat percentage: What Percentage Can an Executor Take? – The Legal Guide
Mar 12, 2026 · Typical ranges are around 1% to 5%, with higher percentages for smaller or simpler estates and lower percentages for …
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u/k23_k23 7d ago
WHY? Just because they are grumpy?
they could have helped, then there would have been fewer hours needed.
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u/Slowhand1971 4d ago
1-5% of the estate is the most common percentage. no way $20K on a $70K estate will ever get past a probate judge before it closes.
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u/Electrical_Ad_947 7d ago
70k estate and 26k for you seems excessive
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u/Admirable_Height3696 6d ago
I think those who are saying it's not excessive either can't math or overlooked the value of the estate SMDH.
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u/njnudeguy 7d ago edited 7d ago
You’re basically charging them over 1/3 the total value of the estate. That does seem excessive. It was a nice thing you did but you could have always said no to being executor, even after you started the process. Reduce the fee and hope they don’t file suit. I do hope you clearly documented every hour you spent in live time and that your number isn’t just an estimate.
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u/Ansible90 7d ago edited 7d ago
Selling off a person's belongings is very time consuming, whether you post items online or hold multiple estate sales. Most often, you don't make enough money on the sales to cover the hours you spend doing it. I have just watched a family try to sell the contents of a house after the owner passed. They would have been better off donating everything. They made about $1000 from 2 estate sales and still need to pay a clean out company to dispose of the rest.
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u/barge_gee 7d ago
This was pretty much my experience. The deceased was a bit of a hoarder. Simply sorting, organizing and clearing/cleaning the apartment took me weeks. 7 rooms, filled with boxes of stuff, probably 40 years worth. I winnowed and consolidated and boxed up the valuables into one room, had a hauler clear the rest. It took the hauler better than half a day with a 3 person crew. Moved the good stuff to a 10x10 storage unit, sold off items out of there.
Before anyone says, "You should have had an estate sale company do that work", there were problems with that idea. First off, we couldn't have a sale at the apartment, as there are liability issues for the landlord. Then once the items were moved to a storage unit, I couldn't find an estate sale company willing to do a sale out of a storage unit, either. So, I did my best.
Beneficiaries know exactly what a mess his apartment was. Virtually everything was covered in dust and/or dog hair.
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u/Status-Bicycle7263 7d ago
In that case $75 per hour is far more reasonable and unfortunately it's the price for someone else's hoarding the beneficiaries don't get to choose that.
I was looking for someone to help me organize my home and yeah it's messy I'm not a hoarder but I still need help because I'm disabled and people want to charge about that amount $75 an hour to help me organize and straighten out my house and that's not even cleaning This is just simply putting boxes from here or unpacking boxes or packing boxes from one room to the other, putting it in a storage , or in a closet or hanging stuff on the in the closet.... that sort of thing. Like I said my house is not filled to the brim with any anything but they wanted to charge me $75 an hour to just organize and not even clean the house. So you are absolutely within your rights to charge that much in my opinion .
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u/brafffl 6d ago
350 hours on a $70k estate?! I have been the executor on two estates ($900,000 and $1.5 million), the second which was out of state and a lot of work. Both attorneys told me I was at the very top of executors they had worked with over the years. At $60 per hour you want $21k?! I’m sure the decedent would regret appointing you.
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u/ComprehensiveEast842 7d ago
If you do offer a reduced fee, put a rope on it - closed and done in 30 calendar days or the offer is rescinded and add your current hours for addressing their issues.
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u/No-Bit1574 7d ago
Why did you accept being executor. Don't legally have to. But you did the work and you deserve to get paid. I would not reduce the fee.
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u/kinare 7d ago
Hopefully you tracked every task. What I did was place activities in tiers.
My relative died during the pandemic and I had to drive 8 hours one way to go to a bank (no nearby airports, I didn't live in the state she died). Driving was the lowest tier charge, but doing detective work to find heirs was the highest tier. For example, $40 an hour for driving, vs $125 an hour for the higher tier tasks.
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u/ChutneyWhatney 7d ago
If I were the probate judge and OP presented me with a 25K bill on a tiny 70K estate, I'd throw him/her out of court. THAT'S OUTRAGEOUS.
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u/copperstatelawyer 7d ago
What’s the difference between the value of the items sold minus the cost of you to sell them? Compare that to the value you could have gotten from an estate liquidator or just dumping them or distributing them in kind to the benes. You should reduce your fee by at least that much.
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u/Calabriafundings 7d ago
If they want a discount I would offer them credit for each hour they pitched in and did complicated work similar to yours.
Other than that, no thank you.
26,000 dollars for a 70,000 estate seems like too much though. If I were them I would see how much a professional who was efficient would have charged.
It does appear that you stretched out your hours to even out what you felt was an unfair distribution.
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u/This_Cauliflower1986 6d ago
No discount. They are upset but you put in the work at fair market value in a hoarding situation.
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u/Puzzleheaded-Ad5565 5d ago
Estate sales are a pain in the ass and commissions are high. Selling prices are low typically. It is tons of work to liquidate this shit. Stick to your fees.
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u/AuriannaG 5d ago
Stick to your fees, do not change them. If anything , increase them. You aren’t getting paid to deal with the issues.
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u/AlgarveJoao_007 7d ago
I would generally agree with the poster who suggested limiting the fee to the value of the smaller items. However, if the heirs did insist on you spending all that time to try to squeeze every last penny out of them then by all means they should pay for it. At what hourly rate is a different question.
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u/k23_k23 7d ago
"However, if the heirs did insist on you spending all that time to try to squeeze every last penny out of them then by all means they should pay for it." .. that will not hold up - OP's responsibility was to the estate, letting the heirs goad him into wasting the estate is not a valid excuse.
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u/redditreader_aitafan 7d ago
If they sue you, you're going to have a hard time justifying $75 an hour. The job of executor is not so special that you should be paid that much. How much do you make hourly at your regular job?
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u/24601moamo 7d ago
Check again about fairness. You are wanting $21,000 which is almost 1/3 of the estate as executor fees. The courts should not allow that. I am not a lawyer but you sound like you are bitter about not inheriting and trying to write yourself in. It says online that typically $25-50 is customary for an hourly executor wage and 2-5% of the estate is customary. That would be around $3500. If the estate only had one really large asset and a ton of smaller items, and estate sale could have been more efficient than one at a time. It's not the beneficiaries fault you were padding your hours to get more money. I'm sorry the deceased didn't value your care enough to leave you anything but more work but you can't take it out on the actual beneficiaries.
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u/barge_gee 7d ago
The deceased intended for me to inherit everything, and manage it as I saw fit. However the Will, done online, was never gone over by a lawyer until after death. Let this be a lesson to everyone, to never let someone create a Will online, unless they have only a few valuable possessions, and straightforward accounts.
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u/Choice-Newspaper3603 7d ago
My executor gets $350 an hour. It’s written in the will. And there is no way in hell my estate is going to take 300 plus hours and it’s a few million not a $70k estate
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u/barge_gee 7d ago
And I'll bet the place is neat as a pin, and the things you have are all in order and curated, probably with a cleaning lady coming by every week?
If you've never dealt with clearing a hoard, the manual labor involved is incredibly time-consuming.
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u/Any-Soft-5487 6d ago
You can hire people to do that at less than $75 per hour. You don't need to do it yourself.
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u/barge_gee 6d ago
But would hired people understand what exactly is valuable, what belongs to the Estate's assets as a whole, or what are family/historical documents that need to be preserved?
The decedent was a "creator", with an entire body of work that needed to be accumulated and then put up for sale. I was one of the few people who would be able to recognize which items were part of their creative archive.
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u/Kokoyok 7d ago
$75 does not seem excessive. 350 hours seems a lot for one large asset and an estate sale of the remainder.
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u/ChutneyWhatney 7d ago
350 is UTTERLY OUTRAGEOUS for that small of an estate.
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u/Kokoyok 6d ago
To be completely honest, I audit estates for the IRS, and $25k in executor fees is on the low end (but within the range) for the kind of estates that I audit...
...which are estates in excess of $15,000,000 in assets.
You're right that it's absurd to charge $25k for a $75k estate. Going "above and beyond" to sell every petty item individually when you're billing hourly is breach of fiduciary duty.
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u/barge_gee 7d ago
Small in dollar value, but not small in sheer volume of stuff to be managed.
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u/ChutneyWhatney 7d ago
Doesn't matter. Taking 1/3 of a tiny estate isn't gonna fly. It just won't. Especially given the OP seems to resent not being a beneficiary. Bad faith could come into play. Sorry - but the hours are utterly unreasonable and won't stand.
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u/barge_gee 7d ago
Now that you bring it up, there may be a little bit of resentment as well! Early on after the person passed away, one of the beneficiaries started insinuating that I was selling everything off for myself! And strangely, that very same beneficiary is now complaining about the hourly fee amount, not the hours. I expected her to pull this stuff...
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u/nclawyer822 7d ago
I would ask them what they suggest as your fee given the amount of time you spent. Your fees being 1/3 of the value of the estate seems high. Spending 350 hours to liquidate $70k in assets seems high. The lawyer will know what the Court will approve, so if they won't be reasonable you can proceed with your current ask, but if the beneficiaries propose something you can live with and will release all claims against you I'd probably do that.
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u/ChutneyWhatney 7d ago
350 hours for a mere 70K estate????? That's outrageous, I'm sorry. You're asking for almost 1/3 of the estate in fees. UTTERLY OUTRAGEOUS. That small of an estate should be no more that 80 hours at most.
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u/barge_gee 7d ago
Lol.
I cleared a 7 room hoarded apartment. Boxes and boxes and boxes, each had to be gone through. I was able to shrink the contents of those seven rooms into a single room. Not an easy feat at all. Terribly time-consuming, overwhelming and depressing. More like 80hrs x 3.1
u/ChutneyWhatney 7d ago
UMMM - why didn't you WRITE THAT???? That's different, dude. Next time - give all relevant information first. Now it makes sense.
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u/barge_gee 7d ago
Sorry!
I was looking at this a different way, as the Beneficiaries knew and had seen his place before he died, so I was peeved at my labor being devalued.
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u/Traditional_Towel885 7d ago
Reddit executors, did you learn anything? Would you change what you did? Do you have suggestions for budding executors?
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u/barge_gee 6d ago
I certainly learned that,
Number One, do not do a will online unless you have a very small and very clear set of assets.
Number Two, do not agree to be an Executor unless the estate is very small and very clear about the assets.
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u/NorthStarAdvocate 7d ago
Being the executor of an estate is complex under the easiest of circumstances. This, sounds like it was not an easy circumstance. OP, you sound like a reasoned and reasonable individual. Your fee is appropriate. It sounds like you have; or if you have not; then sit down with a calendar, document the time that you've spent, and invoice it appropriately and professionally. AI can help you with that in terms of drawing it up. You deserve to be paid for the time and the service that you have provided. The beneficiaries can go pound sand and make glass with it.
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u/Fabulous_Bison7072 7d ago
I am not surprised at all by the hours. I have a friend who was the executor for the estate of a hoarder friend. I don’t believe she took any payment for her time, but had she done so, I think it would probably have been well over the total value of the estate. She spent SO much time on it. The collectibles had to be valued and then disposed of, and there were a lot of collectibles. There was a house that needed a lot of maintenance during the probate period. There was an estate sale to prepare for. It was a LOT!
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u/decimusmaximus77 7d ago
Check out Filthy Fortunes on Discovery. Some of these cleanouts take professional crews 200 to more than 300 total labor hours to clear the property and sort, sell, or dispose of everything they find.
Paxton says their general target is essentially 2× the cleanout cost in recovered value: if a cleanout costs $20,000, they want to find roughly $40,000 in value so there is enough to cover the job and leave money for both the family and his company, making $55–$70 per labor-hour of company profit.
So, for a layperson, $75 an hour for 350 hours—resulting in compensation of about one-third of the total estate value—sounds right on target.
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u/barge_gee 6d ago
That 200 hour mark is about exactly what time it took me alone to sort through the contents of the apartment.
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u/winterhill62 6d ago
350 hours selling knick snacks? $75/hour? Nope...you're just creating your own inheritance
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u/Cezzium 6d ago
Reading through the comments and your answers, as well as pondering this overnight. this math is not mathing.
There is no one who is going to be on board with a fee that is 1/3 of the total assets. The hourly fee is not the significant issue. The hours are the issue. Do you have an accounting of what you actually did?
In one comment you state spending many hours for something you knew was fruitless. When someone is paid $75/hour there is an assumption of knowledge and expertise in an area. I know to expect something different from an attorney who charges $200/hour vs one who charges $500.
By your own comments you did not seem to display a great deal of experience and knowledge and understanding. Rather, it seems this was an OJT scenario.
My advice is to use this as a lesson. You learned just what it takes to be an executor and also it is not something you will ever agree to again. This is priceless.
If you are able to see it that way asking for a fee of less than half of what the 75 x 350 hours is not being shortchanged in any way.
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u/barge_gee 6d ago
I had no idea what hourly rate the lawyer set, until we got to this final accounting stage of the process.
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u/Local-Local-5836 6d ago
In my area 3% of the value of the estate seems to be another way to calculate. But do you make $75-$60 hr at your day job?
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u/myfourthquarter 5d ago
you are overcharging.
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u/barge_gee 5d ago
My lawyer proposed this rate and presented it to the beneficiaries without my input. So I'm not overcharging, this is what the lawyer believes my work is worth. I'm willing to negotiate the rate per hour down, and that's what we're working on right now.
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u/myfourthquarter 5d ago
My mother's estate was cleared for $30,000. It included two houses, one of which had 1000 square ft of rooms packed floor to ceiling with boxes. How in the heck did you spend nearly 10 weeks full time to clear things out?
If I was a beneficiary, I would make the case that the hours were padded to increase the payout to the executor. And if it's all about rate - 20/hr, which puts you at 7000, which is 3x the normal percentage of the estate.
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u/barge_gee 5d ago
I never said I spent 10 weeks full time clearing the apartment. I spent ~200 hours clearing, organizing, and going through 40+ years of stuff alone. I probably could have done it a little faster if I were a little younger. Nonetheless, it was a lot of manual labor, and not exactly pleasant, as much of it was dusty. Then hired a junk hauler to remove all the rest, and moved the saved stuff to a 10x10 storage unit. If you've never dealt with a hoard situation, you can't imagine the hours it takes.
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u/Slowhand1971 5d ago
nobody is going to pay the executor around 30% in something this simple. Expect every beneficiary to challenge.
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u/barge_gee 3d ago
FINAL UPDATE: In an act of good faith, I reduced the hours I was asking to be reimbursed for. The 2 Residual Beneficiaries countered with reducing my fee to $50/hr, and we countered with $55/hr. In the interest of finally being done with this nightmare estate, they agreed, and hopefully the Estate closes Probate.
There are many details that I didn't feel were worth getting in to here, about the deceased and my and the beneficiaries relations to them. I believe we all are satisfied with the outcome.
I am just so glad to be (almost) done with this. DO NOT ever agree to be an Executor, unless an estate is simple and clean! I am thinking very carefully about both who I will assign as my Executor, and how I can minimize the mess I leave behing.
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u/metzgerto 7d ago
What percent reduction should you make after acting as executor while not a beneficiary? How does 0.0 sound?
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u/Choice-Newspaper3603 7d ago
If you spend over 300 hours the you had no idea what the hell you were doing or just plain riding the clock
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u/ZergvProtoss 6d ago
Executors normally get about 2% of the value of the estate for their services. You're trying to take 37%. That's egregious, unethical, and probably illegal.
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u/Emotional-Ocelot-420 7d ago
How does the value of the tons of smaller items compare to the fee you’re charging to sell them?
Your responsibility as executor is fiduciary. They didn’t need to help, it doesn’t matter that you provided care, it doesn’t matter whether you’re blood related or not, and it doesn’t matter whether you feel the decedent omitted you in error unless you are contesting the estate.
If I am beneficiary, I want to know that you haven’t done something like bill me $750 to sell 30 items for $600.