What Should You Do When Someone Dies in Ketchikan Gateway Borough, Alaska?

Alaska requires an inventory of the estate's assets within 90 days of your appointment, and in a probate case it is filed with the Ketchikan Gateway Borough Superior Court.AS 13.16.365, 13.16.370, 13.16.375Verified Jul 13, 2026 You set the fair-market values yourself; no independent appraiser is required. Assets discovered later go on a supplemental inventory. The plan gives you a place to record each asset — its category, its value on the date of death, how that value was established, and whether it passes through probate or outside it — and totals the probate and non-probate columns separately as you go.

Before a bank will release anything, it wants proof you have authority over the estate: Letters Testamentary if there's a will, Letters of Administration if there isn't. You get them from the Ketchikan Gateway Borough Superior Court by petitioning to open the estate and being appointed. The plan pre-fills the Alaska petition for probate and letters from what you've already entered — the decedent's details, the heirs, and a good-faith estimate of the probate property from your inventory — so you're editing a draft rather than starting one.

Every institution holding an account has its own death-claim process, and they differ more than people expect — different forms, different documents, different departments. The plan's directory covers 7 banks, credit unions, and insurers operating in Alaska plus 325 national institutions, and carries each one's claim process, the documents it asks for, and where to send them. Add the ones this estate actually holds and they become tasks on the timeline.

Alaska does not route the estate's final account through the court in every case.AS 13.16.620, 13.16.630Verified Jul 11, 2026 The plan keeps the ledger behind that account: money into the estate, money out of it, and money to beneficiaries, each entry categorized the way an estate account is organized. It carries the running balance and a charge-and-discharge summary — what you took in against what you paid out and still hold — so the numbers are assembled before you fill in the form the court wants.

Creditors in Alaska have 4 months from the first publication of the creditor notice to bring a claim against the estate.AS 13.16.450, 13.16.460, 13.16.465, 13.16.470, 13.16.475Verified Jul 13, 2026 Anything distributed before that window closes is still reachable by a creditor, which is the exposure most executors don't see coming. Enter the date the clock started and the plan works out when the window closes, then holds the distribution and final-accounting steps until it does.

More than most people order the first time. Each bank, insurer, and agency that closes an account generally wants its own certified copy, and Alaska charges $30 for the first one, $25 for additional copies ordered at the same time. The plan counts the copies this estate needs recipient by recipient — every institution, agency, and office on the plan, plus the Ketchikan Gateway Borough court — prices the order, and tracks which copies have gone out and which you still hold.