Digital Assistants for the Individual Executor

If you're the executor of your rich uncle's estate, you can hire a trust company to handle much of the drudgery. Executors of smaller estates may find help online. Executor.org charges $99 a year, EstateExec has a $79 one-time fee. Both encourage the amateur executor to keep good records.

Do you know of other noteworthy sources of online assistance?

Choose a Corporate Executor

From Money: How To Pick a Pro to Manage Your Money When You’re Gone.

Bill for Settling Leona Helmsley's Estate: $100 Million

Settling the $5.4 billion estate left by Leona Helmsley had its challenges, according to this Daily News dispatch:

The four executors who filed their request in Manhattan Surrogate's Court were two Helmsley grandsons, Walter and David Panzirer, her longtime attorney Sandor Frankel and friend John Codey. [A fifth executor was Leona's brother, now deceased.] 

According to court papers, the executors quietly sold off $2 billion in government bonds, handled her interests in more than 80 properties — including the Empire State Building — and dealt with her financial stake in five corporations and 27 businesses. 

In addition, they convinced a judge to trim the $12 million bequest from Helmsley to her dog Trouble to $2 million and sorted out a dicey challenge to her will by a pair of disinherited grandkids.

For completing those tasks and more, the executors request a fee of $100 million.

How UK Banks Garner Executorships

Banks in Britain can offer will-writing services. Good way to pick up executorships? You bet.

Maybe too good.

Nikolai Breaks the Bank!

Remember An Estate Treasure Named Nikolai? The Fabergé portrait of the personal bodyguard of the last Czarina of Russia proved to be precious indeed.

Estimated to sell for $500,00-$800,000, Nikolai did much, much better. He fetched $5.2 million!

You can read about the provenance that made him such a treasure here.

The Chamber-Cossack named Nikolai.
His eyes are sapphires. His beard is Siberian jasper.

An Estate Treasure Named Nikolai

IRS audits and feuding heirs can make estate settlement a thankless job. Once in a while, happily, some forgotten treasure turns up in a barn or attic to enliven the process – a Duesenberg perhaps, or a Picasso.

In the estate of an unidentified New Yorker, the attic treasure is a rare portrait statuette by Fabergé. 

Meet Nikolai Nikolaevich Pustynnikov, personal bodyguard to Alexandra, last Empress of Russia.

The Nikolai statuette –his eyes are cabochon sapphires – was part of the Czarist loot the Soviets exported in the 1930s to obtain hard currency. Brought to the United States by Armand Hammer, it was sold to the New Yorker's mother-in-law in 1934. Apparently Nikolai was exiled to the attic for so long that Fabergé historians assumed he was lost forever.

A similar bejeweled statuette, portraying the bodyguard of Alexandra's mother-in-law, the Dowager Empress, stands guard in a St. Petersburg museum. As for Nikolai, when he marches onto the auction block October 21, he is expected to earn the estate at least $500,000.

Update: The auction is scheduled for October 27-28.