Careful What You Click

As I mentioned on Saturday, we need to get a Tax Identification Number for Mom's estate; the main office of one of the investment companies doesn't care that the account is going to be closed and everything is going to be put under Dad's social security number, they still want a TIN. I went on-line on Saturday but discovered I needed to do it when someone was in the office on the East coast, so I got on this morning as soon as I got back from my morning walk. If you have to do this, be really careful what you click on. When you enter "Taxpayer Identification Number" in the on-line search box you will come up with a bunch of sites, with the ones at the top of the list looking very official. The correct one is Taxpayer Identification Numbers (TIN) irs.gov, which is near the middle of the page. This morning I clicked on this one, Tax ID (EIN) Number - Step-by-step Online Application. It was going well until I got near the end ... when it asked for money. Specifically $247 in order to get the TIN in about 2 weeks. I should have known it wasn't the official website; the eagle in the upper left corner of the first page looked sort of like the Third Reich eagle. The real website gives you a TIN for free, it arrives at your computer about 1 minute after you click on "Submit".

Today was another productive day for getting things resolved with Mom's estate. However, none of it is photogenic. I got Mom's name removed from 2 of their credit cards. Both times I had to wake Dad up so he could tell the customer service rep that I had his permission to talk to them. How Master Card takes care of this is rather convoluted. I called the customer service number and started with Daniel, who connected me with Zach. Zach said he removed Mom's name from the account and that the card would still work for Dad; he wanted to confirm with Dad. When Zach found out Dad was 92 and asleep, Zach said we could call back later when Dad was awake. Later, when Dad was awake, I called and talked to Megan; we went through the same things that Zach did, Mom was still on the account so Megan had to remove her. Again. Megan then directed me to take a copy of the Death Certificate to the local branch, who would then make a copy and send it to the credit card group. So an hour later I went to First Hawaiian, explained why I was there, and gave Lucy the Death Certificate. It turns out Mom's name was still on the account and Lucy had to remove it for the 3rd time! She also gave me a form for Dad to sign. So Master Card took talking to 5 people, having someone remove Mom's name 3 times, a trip to the local branch, and a form that needs to be signed and returned. Discover took a call with 1 person to do it. Okay, so maybe today wasn't so productive; I just spent a lot of time doing stuff.

I'm hoping Dad will wake up earlier tomorrow so that we can go to the HawaiiUSA Federal Credit Union to close Mom's account there. We'll be depositing the money from that account in to Mom & Dad's Territorial Savings account; that one has the highest interest rate at 0.025%. It's not much, definitely not as much as investing, but Dad doesn't want to deal with Mom's investments so we're helping him move things to the savings account, as well as consolidating the many bank accounts that Mom had. The HawaiiUSA and Edward Jones accounts are the last ones that we need to close.

Happy Birthday to cousin Val & Mariah!