California Inventory & Appraisal — Form DE-160

[Music] Hi this Keith Davidson Albertson and Davidson in this video I'm going over the inventory and appraisal form that you will need any time you do a probate if your probating a will or providing an estate that doesn't have them well what we call an intestate estate you will have to file an inventory and appraisal with the court so let's take a look at what this form is we're gonna start at Google and just put in Judicial Council forms and we'll go to the courts website and then we're gonna want to toggle down to the probate decedent's estates that's where all the forms are that we want to use and then we're going to go down to form de 160 and that's the inventory and appraisal now form de 160 is interesting because you do have to fill out all of the estate information on it all of the assets that you know about but every time you do an inventory an appraisal you have a choice you don't necessarily have to do a final inventory appraisal you can do what we call partial inventory appraisals meaning that you can impress one asset and then you can appraise another asset the reason why they allow that is because some assets take longer to appraise than others and so sometimes you want to do an appraisal of the easy items first and file that with the court so that everybody knows what's happening and then you can do the more difficult items as time permits we're gonna start off here by putting in our name and address information so if you're doing this you don't have an attorney you would just put pro per after your name but for those of us who are attorneys we would put in our name and our state bar number and then put in your law firm name of course and all of the address information you also will put in your phone number fax number email address all of that good stuff I'm not gonna spend the time doing it here but you certainly can and then you're gonna put in who you represent so again if you're doing this on your own you can just put your name Keith Davidson representing Keith Davidson but if you're an attorney you'll put in the name and then we need the court information so whatever county you're in you would go ahead and type that in here and then go to the courts website find the street and mailing addresses and sometimes they are different so make sure you get the right ones and then just make sure you include them in your form and then you're gonna put in the branch name if you know it if you don't know it you can go look it up if you still can't find it you can just leave it blank this is gonna be the state of Bob Smith and we're gonna call this decedent you'll notice that you also have the choice of conservator or miner an inventory an appraisal is using conservatorships and guardianship Stu it's the same form works the same way we just happen to be doing an estate so we'll click the decedent box and then you're gonna put the case number where you want to have this filed in make sure you have the right case number and they want the date of death of the decedent if you're dealing with an estate or the appointment of the guardian or conservator if you're dealing with the conservatorship or guardianship so we're dealing with the decedent so we're gonna put in a date of death of October 1st 2018 now the form wants to know is this a partial inventory a final a supplemental are corrected of reappraisal for sale or a property tax certificate most of the time you're either going to be doing a partial or a final that's the most common choices sometimes people will do a supplemental sometimes there will be a correction sometimes it will be reappraised for sale whatever the situation is you'll notice the partials comes with this little box over here you to say it's a partial number whatever number it is so if this is the first one you're filing it'd be partial number one if it's the second one it's two I've seen a states where they've had six seven eight partials before they get to a final just depends on the complexity of the estate now up here where you have the appraisal you'll notice that it says total appraised by representative guardian or conservator on attachment 1 that's what the personal representative is going to appraise themselves and there's really only one thing the personal representative can appraise him or herself and that is cash and that's it the personal representative is not allowed to appraise anything else not even marketable securities so you might have a hundred shares of Apple and you might be able to go to the stock listings and figure out what those hundred shares of Apple are worth on the date of death but you still can't appraise that the probate referee has to appraise that for you only cash so that's what item number one attachment one is going to be number 2 is the total appraised by the referee attachment 2 and again that's what the referee is going to do for you you will be assigned a referee by the court when you open your probate matter and that's the person you're going to have to send this form to once you're done filling it out you're not going to fill out these amounts right now these amounts will be filled out later on once the assets are appraised now we're going to go down here so attachments 1 & 2 together with all prior inventories filed to contain a true statement of all or a portion of the estate so this is where you need to state that either the these are all the assets or these are only partial list of the assets number 4 is pretty rare this is where no probate referee is required I suppose if you had an estate that literally is only cash then you could click that or if there's a special circumstance and the court orders that there is no probate referee required it very rarely happens the court does want to know about the bond so if there's a bond you're gonna want to list that here the reason why the court wants to know about the bond on the inventory an appraisal is because the bond is typically set based on the value of the estate so if you started off the estate with a bond of $10,000 but then it turns out that you have $100,000 of liquid assets then the courts going to want to increase the bond and so you have to put debt down here so for example the bond filed in the amount of $10,000 would either be sufficient or insufficient based on this appraisal so the court wants to know about the bond and then we have the declaration by the probate referee so this is where the probate referee is going to sign the form saying all everything that he appraised or she appraised on attachment two is true and correct so there's a lot of there's a lot going on on this form it's a really simple looking form but you as the personal representative have to sign your piece you have to sign a piece about the bond and then the probate referee has to sign their piece so a lot of different people have to sign this stuff saying you know that everything is proper now let's go back to the forms and we'll take a look at what the attachments are and so that's going to be inventory an appraisal attachment form d1 61 so you notice that it has an attachment number up here in its blank so this is the same attachment form that both the personal representative and the probe a referee are going to use so if you have some cash this will be attachment 1 and you'll just list the the bank information so let's say you have a Bank of America checking account and you'll put the description of that there and let's say it has $5,000 you'll list that there and then that's going to be it that's all you're going to have on this form if however you're sending this off to the probate referee because the probate referee has to appraise everything else that's not cash then up here you're gonna put attachment number 2 because that's what the appropriate probate referee appraises and then you're going to start listing out all the assets so for example maybe you have a building it's part of the estate I'm going to use our address as an example I need to have this appraised because it's real property so I'm going to put a description of it here and then I'm gonna leave the value blank because the probate referee will fill that in and then if I have something else I'm gonna list that here and I might say a hundred shares of Apple oops stock and I'm gonna leave that blank because that really is up to the probate we're free to fill in the values and I'm gonna just keep on going I'm gonna list every single asset that's part of this estate and I'm then going to mail the entire form along with this attachment to the probate referee and the probate referee is gonna come through and fill out these values for me and then send it back to me and with the signature so once the probate referee does their part then they're going to put the total amount of statutory commissions and expenses that they're owed and they're going to sign this so they're going to give you back this signed and the attachment with all the values filled out you're going to use those values that they give you to fill out number two which is the total amount of assets on attachment two and that will be the value that you put in here you can't do that until the probate referee gives you the form back also the statutory commission is based on a percentage of the assets so the probate referee gets paid a percentage of what they appraised and so the probate referee will tell you how much they're entitled to in terms of a commission and whether or not they have any expenses that they're entitled to have reimbursed so this is a little bit of a team effort you have to do your part you have to send it off to the probate referee the probate referee has to do their part and then you'll have a completed inventory and appraisal that you can file with the court to establish what the beginning assets are for that probate estate. 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