Buffalo Estates Cross a Border More Often Than Any Others in New York

When someone dies with a will, the named executor files it with the Erie County Surrogate's Court along with a probate petition. After the court admits the will and issues letters testamentary, the executor gathers assets, pays valid debts and taxes, and distributes the remainder to beneficiaries. The SCPA governs each step, and we guide executors through the process from filing to final accounting.

Elder law addresses the legal and financial issues of aging, including long-term care, Medicaid eligibility, guardianship, and protecting a spouse who remains at home. With nursing home costs high in Western New York, advance planning, often using trusts and timely transfers under Medicaid rules, can preserve assets while securing needed care. We help Buffalo families plan before a crisis arises.

Yes. Interested parties may object to a will in the Erie County Surrogate's Court on grounds such as lack of capacity, undue influence, fraud, or improper execution under the EPTL and SCPA. Objections must be raised within the court's deadlines and supported by evidence. We represent both proponents defending a will and family members challenging one.

Both, in different places. Real property is governed by the law where it sits, so an Ontario cottage is dealt with under Ontario procedure even when the owner lived in Buffalo, and a New York will may need to be resealed or a separate estate opened there. Cross-border families also face two tax systems that treat death very differently — Canada taxes a deemed disposition of capital property, the United States taxes the estate itself — and the treaty between them decides how credits work. This is one of the few situations where planning without counsel on both sides of the border reliably goes wrong.

Canadian registered accounts have their own rules on death, and a rollover that would be automatic for a Canadian spouse may not be available to a beneficiary living here. There can also be Canadian withholding and a US reporting obligation on the same money. The practical point is to identify these accounts while the owner is alive, because the choice of beneficiary changes the outcome substantially and cannot be revisited afterwards.

That is a common Erie County question, and there are two honest answers. Where the personal property is modest and no real property stood in the decedent's sole name, a simplified filing may be enough. Where the house is in that name, a full proceeding is required regardless of value, and sometimes the right advice is that the numbers do not justify it — in which case the house should be dealt with during life, not left to an estate.

Not until title is cleared, and the buyer's title company will be the one to tell you. The fix is to open the estate that was never opened — sometimes two, if a second owner also died — and to prove who the relatives are. Buffalo has a great deal of this, and every year that passes adds heirs and removes the people who could have explained the family tree.

At the Erie County Surrogate's Court in downtown Buffalo. A straightforward estate with a clear will and cooperative relatives commonly moves through in several months. Delay here usually comes from three places: distributees nobody can locate, property that must be appraised or sold, and creditor claims — including Medicaid — that must be settled before anything is distributed.

By writing down the arrangement that currently exists only as habit. A trust or a limited liability company can hold the camp with rules about who uses it when, how taxes, insurance and repairs are funded, and how a family member who wants out is bought out over time. Left as equal shares among cousins, it becomes a partition proceeding one generation later.

The tax is not the reason. In Erie County the reasons are the cost of long-term care, the risk of a house that cannot be transferred, and the difference between an administration that takes four months and one that takes two years. Those apply to every household, and they are decided by documents that cost far less than the problems they prevent.