Slowly Erasing my Father

My father passed away about a month ago, and I am the named executor of the estate.  However, I didn't get the death certificate for five weeks, and now I have to wait another month or two for a probate hearing.  So for the next couple of months the estate is in a sort of a gray zone waiting for things to happen, but in the mean time I have to manage his estate and data.

My dad did leave a notebook with his passwords, so I got access to my father’s email, cellphone, bank and other on-line accounts, and I am taking this gray zone time to figure out where his assets are, closing on-line accounts (Amazon), and moving any ongoing emails that are needed over to my email (mostly utilities).  Basically I am erasing his on-line presence and replacing it with mine, a sort of benevolent ID hack.

I don’t know what I would do if I had not found his password notebook, randomly stored in a drawer, as this has been an extremely time consuming and exhausting process even when I had access to about 90% of his accounts.  

The funny part is when his bank got word of his death.  In general there are two ways banks find out someone died:

• Someone (usually the heirs) tells them. 
  
  
• Social Security Tells Them – This happens when SS needs to claw back any funds they distributed in a bank account.  The claw back depends on the timing of the last SS payment and the date of death. 

Unfortunately since the death certificate took so long, the SS got wind after an extra payment, and had to claw back, so told the bank.  The funny part is how Chase froze his account, by saying it was $99 BILLION over withdrawn.  That will certainly freeze it until I get the Letters Testamentary, then I go into a Chase branch and turn it into an Estate Account.