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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Get out of BOA/Merril. They are awful to deal with for your heirs. Please. I beg you. [/quote]

Wait why?? We have a ton of money invested through them and I didn’t know this!! We are leaving a lot to our kids hopefully and my parents are with BOA/Merrill wealth management too!!! 
What? Details
Please?[/quote]

Hi--I'm the poster who said BOA/Merrill was horrible to deal with as an heir. I was the successor trustee for my aunt's trust. She has since died and I was her executor. Her husband was my blood uncle and they had no children. While she was still living, she became unable to feed herself, drive safely, and stopped paying her bills regularly. As successor trustee, I took the letter of diagnosis from a psychologist declaring her incompetent with severe dementia and not expected to ever improve, a copy of the trust naming me as successor, the Durable Financial Power of Attorney, and my own identification to BOA to activate my rights to manage her money. Oh, my God! It took months, many in-person meetings, filling out huge amounts of paperwork, leaving work in the middle of the day over and over just to get the rights that were so clearly her intention. BOA gave me the runaround, always promising it was just this easy, but I was so frustrated.  And this was with a simple set-up where her bank account was already in the trust and her entire estate consisted of this BOA checking account, a BOA savings account, and a studio condo in DC all in the trust. That's it! Total of around $500k net worth.

And, get this, the savings account was earning 0.01% interest and they refused to move it to anything even though they offered several accounts paying closer to 1-2% at the time. It was horrendous and even the in-person staff who were kind and trying to help had to sit on hold with call centers to get anything done. Hours and hours of my time. UGH!

I was so glad the day the last check to my cousins cashed, I had paid all the taxes, and I could close the account. All in all, it was a 6 year ordeal. [/quote]

Wouldn't it have been easier to just get her userid/password and operate the account instead of going through this process? [/quote]

That’s illegal. [/quote]

It's not illegal if the dpoa is written properly but it CAN be against bank policy, and as the PP successor trustee so eloquently illustrated, the wrong bank can make things very very difficult. My dpoa for my dad was recorded with the bank, but not the one for my mom, so when my dad died their bank (a small pennsylvania bank close to them but nowhere close to me) locked all online account access to their joint account-- even her account. there was no way for me to verify transactions or know if there was the potential of being overdrawn for the month it took for them to verify the same damn dpoa they had verified for my dad, and of course I had to drive an original to the closest branch two hours away just to start the process.

[/quote]

How would the bank know that the person is dead. I've known people without power of attorney in place who passed away. Family accessed the bank account to make sure balance was sufficient to pay mortgage, utilities, etc., until they got things mostly sorted out. [/quote]

Many banks subscribe to Social Security's Death Master File. So once a death has been reported to SS, some banks may lock accounts/transactions for the deceased. Reminder, DPOAs cease to be valid upon death. [/quote]

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