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Solkanar512
Dec 28, 2006

by the sex ghost
A week ago my mother unexpectedly passed away from cancer. She ran a sole proprietorship for 15 years or so - online and in person specialty retail. She is survived by my dad, myself and two brothers who doesn't have the industry knowledge to run the shop - he helped a great deal but this was her dream. We all live in Washington State - community property applies but probate is not required. No will or life insurance but no one is fighting over anything. So I'm working with my brothers to help my dad sort this out.

Is this something that we can do ourselves or do we need to hire an expert (what kind?) to work through this? I'll even take reputable links for info on this, we can't be the first family dealing with this.

The initial plans were to sell off the inventory or even the business (by this I mean the name/website/customer lists/etc) as a whole, use that to pay of the business debt and that would be that. But can we even continue operating the business to sell off the inventory? How does that work when a sole prop dissolves with the death of the owner?

The business is current on all debt payments (my mother sent out checks right before her surgery) and we can continue to keep up on the payments for 2-4 months (still working a few numbers out) out of the business accounts before we would need to sell the business. However, we're going to have to sell at some point (and we have several leads, luckily) to pay off the creditors completely. Can we just do that or do we need to go through probate for this?

So if this is something that we can reasonably do, are there any particular issues we need to consider? The worst I see happening is that we don't pay the bills, the creditors file for probate and got after the remaining inventory and the half interest in the shared property of parents - house, etc. Or will the initial idea of liquidating and selling off assets to pay off creditors and letting my dad have the rest be ok?

Thanks in advance for any help, it's been a really lovely week. If I can get this sorted out, it would really, really help my dad.

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