estate. Toward the end he was getting a little drifty and fancied himself a stock trading genius. At one point he bought and sold some the the same stocks more than once on the same day. With all these stock trades going on, he had the bad form to die on the last day of the month. Some of these trades had not yet settled at the time of his death, so there was no way of showing the exact value of those trades on the last month end statement. And in Virginia, the accounting for the estate must balance to the penny. After spending $22,000 with an attorney who couldn't balance it and two trips to meet the personnel from the Commissioner of Accounts office, the commissioner finally agreed to accept the accounting we were able to come up with after getting notarized letters from all the beneficiaries of the estate that they accepted our accounting. Time was of the essence in getting the estate closed because my FIL had had some rental properties in Baltimore that generated lead paint lawsuits that were settled for thousands of dollars. We were trying to get the estate closed before any additional suits popped up. In addition to the stocks, he had real estate that had to be disposed of in order to close the estate. One such were 10 lots of 1/10th of an acre each adjacent to one another in Roanoke. They were bounded by a rail road track on one side and the street they supposedly were on had not been maintained since just after WW II. We finally contacted all the adjacent landowners and offered the lots for $10 each with us paying the closing fees. One guy finally stepped up and took them. I would estimate we spent over 2000 hours getting the estate closed, thankfully with the full cooperation of all the beneficiaries. And yes, we took the executors fee without guilt.