Grandma died on Jan 2. SS check deposited on Jan 3 and the treasury reclaimed it 3 weeks later. SSA says she is not entitled to the payment because "if it was a paper check, she would not have been alive to endorse it". Grandma had no living spouse or children. I am her only living relative. Do I /should i go to probate court to file for executrix? If I do that, will i be subjected to her creditors ( $1000 credit card and a $80 phone bill) coming after me? I had to spend some of my own money on her final arrangements and the SS check is only for $1160.00. What do I do? Her life insurance paid for most of the final arrangements and she left a chunk to her best friend/ caregiver. She was in nursing home and had no belongings except for sentimental family items and some hand carved furniture her father had made. So the "estate" was minimal and her will was written on notebook paper..it said i would get everything, which, like i said, was only personal household belongings. She lived in VA. I am in NH.

Hi,

It sounds like the payment you describe is your grandmother's Social Security payment for December, which would be payable to someone if she died in January. Social Security has an established priority order for paying underpayments, with priority given to a surviving spouse, child or parent of the deceased in that order (https://secure.ssa.gov/apps10/poms.nsf/lnx/0202301030). If there is no such living relative the underpayment could then go to the legal representative of the deceased's estate (https://secure.ssa.gov/apps10/poms.nsf/lnx/0202301035), and if there is no estate then a claim can be filed in accord with the small estate statutes in the deceased's state of residence at the time of death.

If your grandmother is survived by a relative listed in the priority order, or if you are the legal representative of her estate then a claim for the underpayment could be made by filing a form SSA-1724 with Social Security (https://www.ssa.gov/forms/ssa-1724.html). If that's not the case then it sounds like you would need to follow Virginia's small estate rules, which are described in this section of Social Security's operations manual: https://secure.ssa.gov/apps10/poms.nsf/lnx/0202315085. I'm not a lawyer, though, so I can't answer your question about potential liability for your grandmother's debts.

Best, Jerry