On January 13, 2016, several Iowa State Bar Association (ISBA) leaders met with State Representatives to discuss upcoming bills for the new legislative year. One bill, SF 376/HSB 37, proposes to limit the property used to calculate court costs during probate.
Probate is the court-supervised process of administering a person’s estate. One vital step in the probate process is filing an “inventory”. An inventory is a list of all the property a person owned when they died. The value of the property included on the inventory is used to calculate court costs. Currently, property held in joint tenancy and assets payable to beneficiaries are included in this calculation, even though the court clerk’s office performs no steps necessary for the distribution of those assets.
The proposed bill would exclude this property from the calculation of court costs, limiting the calculation to include only property for which the court clerk “renders services.”
For more information on the role probate plays in estate planning or ways to avoid the court costs associated with probate, please contact Pearson Bollman Law at (515) 298-8850