From abroad
Doing this from another country
Everything about settling a parent’s affairs assumes you can walk into a branch. Turn up with the certificate, show your passport, sign the form. It’s built for somebody who lives twenty minutes away.
If you live in another country, every one of those steps grows a week.
The advice written for this situation is thin, and most of it amounts to telling you to go there, which you had worked out.
What genuinely needs a person in the room
Less than you would think, and not the parts people expect.
Identifying yourself to a bank usually can be done at a distance, with certified documents. Clearing a house cannot. Signing certain estate paperwork often needs a witness in person. Calling an insurer to ask whether a policy exists never does.
The split is worth working out early, because it decides how many trips you take, and the number of trips is the single biggest cost in the whole business.
Certified copies, notarization and apostilles
Three words that mean roughly "somebody official has confirmed this is genuine", at increasing levels of formality.
A certified copy comes from the office that issued the original. A notarized document has been witnessed by a notary. An apostille is a certificate attached by a government confirming that a notary or an official was who they said they were, and it exists so that a document issued in one country is accepted in another.
Apostilles come from a treaty most countries have signed. Which documents need one, and who issues it, depends on both countries, so it is a question to ask once, precisely, rather than to research generally.
Getting this wrong costs a postal round trip, and the round trip is usually two weeks.
The person on the ground
Almost everybody doing this from abroad has one: a sibling, a cousin, an old family friend who still lives on the same street.
Be clear about what you’re asking. Letting somebody into the house is a favor. Sorting out an estate is a job, and it is a heavy one, and asking somebody to do it by accident over eight months is how relationships get damaged.
What that person can genuinely do without any legal standing is more than people assume. They can check the mail. They can confirm the heating is on. They can tell you which envelopes have arrived. Often that’s the whole map you’re missing.
One trip, well timed
Three badly-timed trips is the usual pattern, and it is exhausting and expensive. The first is the funeral, the second is the paperwork nobody warned you about, the third is the house.
Two is realistic. One is possible if somebody has written down the list of institutions before you fly, because then you can make appointments in advance instead of discovering, on a Wednesday, that the bank needs something you left at home.
What you can do at two in the morning
This is the only part that time zones make easier. Gathering.
Which bank, which insurer, which pension, which attorney. Whether there’s a safe deposit box. Who the accountant is. Every one of those is a fact rather than a form, and none of them needs an office to be open.
A family that has that list before the first flight does this in a fraction of the time. A family that starts assembling it afterwards, from mail arriving at a house three time zones away, is the one that ends up making three trips.
Sources
You can gather that list now, while somebody can still answer the phone. Here is a finished binder, free to read: the example binder.