Ok widows, where's the to-do list?

HERE'S MY LIST:

Join: www.widownet.org
Saved my life for years! A place of hundreds of worldwide widows/widowers can vent, ask questions, or compare stories.

Get all financial accounts in YOUR name. Get Certified copies of the death certificate for this task. This will take weeks.

Go through his clothes and belongings. Donate or give away. The prized possessions you keep should be put in a secure place. I bought a small digital safe. His ring, watch, sunglasses, etc. Purge the house of junk before depression sets in.

Do a special tribute. Plant a tree, a park bench in his name, a plaque or similar tribute that will honor him in some way.

Put together photo albums, memory albums or similar, while you can remember the dates. It keeps you busy and eases the grief.

Start doing what you always wanted. Make plans for a cruise, vacation, or something special to look forward to.

See your Doctor for a full checkup. Do new blood work, mammogram, etc. Keep your health intact from the previous stress.

Buy new bedding, redecorate a bit. Make things YOURS.

Get involved in volunteering, a class, or something of part time interest, to keep your mind sharp and meet people. I became a Planning Commissioner, a Notary, and similar activities I didn't have time for before.

Prepare yourself for 6 months out, when the grief really hits. The first and second year were the hardest for me. Avoid toxic people, stay moving forward. You may need counseling. Don't let yourself go down the drain without a fight.

I got a rescue dog, which also saved me from sadness and loneliness. I had a new buddy who adored me. I told people the dog rescued me! My first and only dog, a purebred American Staffordshire (pit bull). We went to the beach, parks, neighborhood walks...Use Cesar Milan's training techniques.

Most of all...keep posting here from experience, to help others who are desperate. Your experience and knowledge are so valuable.

YOU GOT THIS!

Duplicate

GG,
Great info for all of us.
I am glad you are taking charge and let us know how you are doing.

Gray,

If you end up putting all of this into a consolidated list, and post it here, those of us who haven’t been through it yet would certainly be thankful.
Maybe at your six month-out point, then at your year-out point?
I would sure bookmark it!

Not a widow here, but check to see if your husband had life insurance policies that you know nothing about. My dad got a life insurance policy without telling my mom and when she found out about it, she got about 20K from the policy.

Also if your husband puttered around with tools, make sure which of those tools are "imperial" and "metric" and "universal" there's a difference and you need to keep the sets together.

Did your husband hunt/fish? Locate guns and make sure they are Not Loaded. If he had hunting fishing licenses and they are valid, shred them for personal information etc. Fishing tackle can have razor sharp hooks be careful handling those. Also dispose of any hunting supplies like odor maskers. When those go back, they reek.

find out where your husband took the car for Oil changes, etc. and if your cars are still under warranty. Are the cars inspected? Car plates valid? Some states have different laws.

Do you know the codes to lockable things like briefcases. My mom almost had a nervous breakdown trying to figure those out. It was my dad's DOB.

I just discovered two more things for the to-do list: Change the beneficiaries on my life insurance policy and on my IRA.

When my dad died, we did not even bother changing the utilities over to my mom's name. They just coming in each month under his name, and we just kept paying them.

We did cancel his credit card, and his medical insurance plans.

Thank you, everyone, for your information. I've gleaned a good bit that I need to act on yet.

Hi Graygrammie, my husband passed in 2017 and things I learned or ran into:

Like you, I had to call OPM as he had worked for the VA. I made copies of all the paperwork I had to submit and put it in a binder. Luckily I had because there was a mixup with the pension a few months later which never should have happened. (Long story, no one should run into that and it was fixed). My husband knew he had cancer when he selected his pension and longterm prognosis wasn't good, so he took the largest survivor benefit he could (55% I think it was) and I'm now very grateful for that. But the gist here is ... save copies of all important paperwork in case there are issues later.

RMV - My current car (2012) was titled in both our names so the first time I had to renew the registration after he had passed I was able to do it online using his SSN. His name was listed first as we did most things. I live in Massachusetts so this all may vary by state. The next time, 4 years later (same car) it didn't work and I had to get a new title with just my name. I also received an extra excise tax bill which got triggered by the new title. I called the town questioning it and when I explained the circumstances, they abated it.

Savings Bonds - Both my husband and my companies were big on employees buying $100 savings bonds back in the 80's, 90's, etc. and my husband had tried to find all his before he passed but we missed a bunch and I later had to take 129 of them to the bank along with one of the many death certificates and tie up a bank employee for well over an hour as I signed them all and she made copies of every single one. Luckily the amount they were worth did not push his estate into the amount for larger probate ($25,000 in Mass) and we had seen a lawyer prior to his passing to get all we could titled in both our names. But this was 2 years after the fact and I had to call the lawyer back and some other lady from some state office who wasn't happy to deal with this 2 years later.

Taxes - going from married to single, taxes can be a bit of a surprise. I got to claim Qualifiying Widow one year also as my youngest son was still in his 4th year of college and living at home when his dad passed. If you google "widow tax penalty" you can get some information explaining this.

Social Security - I know you said no social security for your husband but for anyone else reading that may have that ... there is a onetime benefit of something like $255 I didn't know about until a few years later so did not claim that. However I learned about survivor's benefit and I am now 64, and taking the social security survivor benefit and will switch to my own, probably at my FRA of 67 as mine will be higher. It helps.

My husband was a veteran and got one of those plaques for the cemetery as he served a year in Vietnam in his 4 years out of high school. He also was in the reserves after we were married for a number of years and had been in Desert Storm as well and he could not find his updated DD214 so the plaque on lists the Vietnam service. I feel bad about that as I know he would have liked both on it.

Facebook - I haven't deactivated his account still. I don't know if I want to though.

I think emotionally there are a lot of things. Little things that hit you out of the blue. I am sorry for your loss and I wish you the best. Thank you for sharing what you have run into as well.

Contact Social Security. I helped my mom with this when my dad passed in May. He was getting a bigger monthly payment than she was. They changed it so that she is now getting his payment (or really close to it) as his survivor. But that’s instead of hers. She doesn’t get both.

if your husband was getting a pension, contact them as well. They should be able to tell you if there is a survivor benefit.

In terms of filing taxes, this year you can go on filing at the married rate, but next year, you will have to file as single. This might adversely affect your tax bracket.

Health insurance and/or Medicare. They might be automatically told.

If you have access to bank statements or old tax returns, I would look over at least the last year of them, to see if there is evidence of him owning any stocks or having any source of income that you weren’t fully away of. Now that so much has gone online, you may not find out through the mail. The online only thing is especially complicated now with the multi factor authentication where you can’t log in as him even if you know his usernames and passwords. It can be hard.

The phone company. Get his cell phone removed/turned off.

Sounds like you are doing good. Best wishes.

Here's another book possibility. I haven't read this one, but found one of the author's other finance books to be useful. I read about him on the bogleheads.org forum.

https://www.amazon.com/After-Death-Your-Spouse-Financial/dp/1950967123/

I’m so sorry, it can become a real quagmire can’t it? I had done some preparation for my husband’s death because that’s a coping mechanism I use. I wish I’d kept my list of things to do, but once it was done, I was happy to toss it. AARP has a checklist and you can do Google searches but it sounds like you’re doing well already. Here’s a few things I can remember that you haven’t mentioned:

Contact at least one of the credit bureaus to notify them(or make sure they’ve been notified) and they will then let the other two know. Equifax, Experian or TransUnion. You can easily find their sites online. This will prevent anyone from opening accounts in your husband‘s name. Just an aside, we have kept our credit frozen for many years as a security measure and it’s very easy to unlock and lock if you ever need to.

You can contact voter registration in your county to make sure he has been taken off the rolls. This may already have been done. I found that the funeral home did contact some agencies, but I don’t remember which. Lower priority on my list was to contact the DMV and I think eventually they were informed by someone else officially. I’m sure a lot of people don’t take these steps, but I just like to know everything‘s been completed that should be.

If your husband had any traditional retirement accounts with you as beneficiary, they can be transferred to you directly rather than as an inherited IRA. If children are beneficiaries, it will be considered inherited, and there are specific guidelines about distribution. In my experience, financial institutions know to do this.

Utilities, we had split up under our names because I think they required a primary customer(or maybe not, it was so long ago). The one I thought would be a hassle to change was a piece of cake, another one I had to jump through a few more hoops but not too big a deal. I like to go to Comcast in person if there are issues, they have been very helpful.

A couple thoughts for down the road: I found much cheaper auto/home insurance a few months ago when I had the energy and wherewithal to look into it. Also, we had sold his car using Carvana and it was the best thing
ever—incredibly easy, fair price. Paperwork was done online, they came to the house, got the title, made sure the car started, loaded it up and drove it away.

My MIL died more than 7 years after my FIL. Practically, she ignored his death in the sense she never did anything regarding his estate. Nine years after his death, we still receive items in his name needing handled.

Because of this, I purchased "When I'm Gone" by Kathleen Fraser has that exact check list on pages 140-141 that you've asked about graygrammie.

"Elegantly designed and tastefully illustrated, When I'm Gone is a fill-in record book and a resource manual to record all the little details of life so that, when someone is absent, for whatever reason, those left behind can cope."

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=when+I%27m+gone+by+kathleen+fraser

Instead of filling in the book, I've taken a blank journal and filled in the same info but keeping the original purchased book empty -- thereby allowing it to be continually used again and again.

I was widowed in 2022, and agree that there were unexpected things. Fortunately not everything has to be taken care of immediately, but it's surprising that I'm still finding things out that need doing. Like you, I'd been handling a lot of household finances and paperwork, not because my husband had dementia but because that had been our division of labor for some time. I had no trouble changing utility bills to my name. For credit cards, I was listed as an authorized user so didn't have trouble canceling my husband's. One oddity was, and still is, a savings account and mortgage which are at a credit union. My husband was the one who opened the credit union savings account a long time ago (50+ years?); he later switched it to a joint account, and this is where we took out a mortgage about 5 years prior to his death when we sold our house and moved to a condo. When I went into the credit union, death certificate in hand, to change the account to just my name they said "It's not necessary" and wouldn't do it! the bank where we have our checking account easily changed our joint account to my name when I presented them the death certificate. They even accepted checks for deposit that came in my husband's name after they had taken his name off our joint account. (Because we didn't have to go through probate I'd never set up an estate account that could have accepted those checks.)

I still get calls asking for my husband, and when I say he's deceased and is there anything I can do, it shuts people up pretty quickly--and it's obvious they are looking for a donation or to sell something. A few will launch into their spiel, directing it to me instead, but most will say they are sorry for my loss and hang up.

Try Amazon for a good little book I cannot remember the Author of called:
Please Don't Die: But if you DO Die, What do I do Next?
Hope it is still there.

You are so right that your being on the bills and the one to pay them all this time is a boon.
The next thing is what my partner N. always warns me: "RELAX. TAKE YOUR TIME. No one is going to shove you out of house and home. Things will start coming in the mail. Handle them one at a time." I hope to go first. I doubt I WILL relax. I DO KNOW first move will be an attorney.

This attorney will get you (if you are executor) an EIN taxpayer number. You need that so that you can begin to draw all money OUT of his other accounts and into one account at the bank that is his account, his EIN as a dead person. This EIN can be got online from IRS. DO NOT TRY THAT. If you word it wrong or press trust when it's an estate or the opposite it means years of woe. IRS won't answer a question without 6 months passing between your question and their answer. Let the attorney get the tax EIN. Go to your bank, ask for appointment with an officer; as for guidance on how to proceed. As you begin to CLOSE accounts that have automatic pay those entities will be out of luck. But your comcast will be shut off as well, ha ha.

From your attorney, if you are the executor, get letters testamentary to prove you are executor of his estate. This will help with the banking work, closing accounts, and etc.

Now to credit card problem. BE THANKFUL they are allowing you to close it.
Close his credit card. This will report to agencies he is deceased and no one will open credit in his name. You HAVE your credit card. You don't need his. Close it down, one and done and be thankful, because closing it otherwise would be a nightmare and dangerous. And yes, by closing one of his credit cards any card with his name on it will be closed. This is also warning to soon to be widows out there. Always have one credit card in your own name. Or you stand to lose all credit standing.

You are doing GOOD GrayGrammie. Really. Relax. No one will come throw you into jail. As you are making out new will ask that attorney if you can use them for phone advice, pay by the hour, ask what you are missing. And ask that they stand to be ready to help you with an hourly fee. WELL WORTH IT.

You are doing great.
Look for Widow support groups anywhere they may exist. If there isn't one form one in your faith based community or some such. Go to Facebook.

It is a horrible journey. I wish you good luck. And I think you are doing GREAT. Don't worry about power bill. BUT warning again. Everyone here should have both names on garbage, power and light, all bills. DO IT TODAY.

Watch for mail, particularly in January. I received a statement for an uncommon type of account in which my late husband had invested. (unlikely since you’ve been handling the bills for years) Or annual newsletters of organizations. Your power company may have instructions on their web site stating what is required to transfer the account.

Do you have investments of your own or insurance stating him as your beneficiary? If so, naming someone else will take the amount outside your estate.

My condolences for the loss of your husband, both for his death and the dementia that preceded it.

Found a couple promising books on Amazon, but I haven't used them personally.

https://www.amazon.com/Now-What-Do-Organizing-Simplifying/dp/0979157757/

https://www.amazon.com/Widows-Guide-Legal-Financial-Surviving/dp/1539141365/

Depending on where you do your banking you may have access to a financial planner. Financial planning is free of charge through my credit union, for example.