Probate is a judicial process, so what that means is a court is involved and the purpose of this process is to transfer assets from an individual who has passed away, the decedent, to the appropriate people who are living. Now the appropriate people depends on a few things, if you have an estate plan, it’s the people you’ve named in your estate plan and the probate process will transfer the assets to those individuals. If there is no estate plan, there is a default in Colorado on where your assets go. So, the judge will help us figure out who those individuals are and then we’ll transfer the assets to those individuals under the default rules.
Probate is a process but that’s not the only thing, we’re not just transferring assets from the decedent to people who are living, we’re also at the same time, settling creditor disputes and any other disputes that arise. As we know families never fight when somebodies dies, but when they do, if they’re fighting over assets or how things are moving, then that will be handled inside of that probate process as well. So the answer to the question is, probate is a judicial process, transferring assets from a decedent to the appropriate people who are living, while at the same time, settling disputes that arise inside that process.
