When someone dies without a will in the State of Texas (known as “intestate”), Texas has default inheritance rules in place for such an occurrence pursuant to the Texas Estates Code. Even if there is no will, an estate can still be probated.
In an intestate estate administration, there are several different processes that can be used in order to probate the estate. It may be best that an affidavit of heirship be used in lieu of a full administration if the estate consists of only few assets that simply need title to transfer to the heirs.
For larger estates and/or those that have complicated assets, an independent or dependent administration is necessary to effectively probate the estate. This requires an application for administration coupled with an application to determine the heirship, meaning a process to determine who the rightful heirs to an estate are. This requires court hearings, multiple witnesses, as well as the procurement of a surety bond in some cases.
Navigating through the difficult time of losing a loved one is difficult enough. If you need assistance in choosing which probate process is the right choice for your intestate estate situation, you can trust the highly-experienced law firm, Yale Law Group, to help in all of your probate and estate planning needs.
