New Mexico Estate Accounting: A Representative's Guide

New Mexico's Supreme Court approves a statewide set of probate forms under NMRA 1B-304, 1B-306 and 1B-501, and every county probate court uses the same set. Form 4B-601 is the Inventory, and Form 4B-602 is the Accounting. Both were recompiled to their current numbers, from 4B-401 and 4B-501, by Supreme Court Order 18-8300-014, effective December 31, 2018; a document still citing the old numbers is out of date.

New Mexico also runs two courts with overlapping ground. The county probate court and the district court share concurrent jurisdiction over informal, uncontested proceedings only. Formal proceedings, contests, will construction, supervised administration and questions of heirship belong to the district court alone, under NMSA 45-1-302. The 4B forms carry the probate court's own caption, STATE OF NEW MEXICO, IN THE PROBATE COURT, and that is the caption printed here. No form for a formal or supervised district-court inventory or accounting was found, so none is invented.

Form 4B-601 lists three columns and nothing more: the item, its estimated value on the date of death, and any mortgage or lien against it. It carries no classification scheme, no legal description line, no community-versus-separate column, and no appraiser block. New Mexico is a community property state, and even so its inventory form asks for no characterization of an asset as community or separate.

Form 4B-602 is not a receipts-and-disbursements ledger. It is a net-worth reconciliation: a Cash and Other Assets side built from what the estate holds and what it has taken in, and a Payments and Distributions side built from what has gone out. Both sides total, and the form says they should match once the estate is wound up.

The inventory is prepared within three months after appointment (NMSA 45-3-706). The personal representative sends a copy to interested persons who request it; filing the original with the court is optional, not required, though the form itself says nothing about filing: the rule is the statute's alone.

New Mexico sets no fee schedule. The percentage schedule that once lived in NMSA 45-3-719 was repealed in 1995, and nothing replaced it with tiers or a base. What is left is bare reasonable compensation, for the personal representative and for the attorney alike, and what is reasonable is the court's to decide, not a number a form or a calculator can produce.

ExecutorLedger computes no New Mexico percentage and prints none. What it reports is the compensation your own ledger already recorded, the figure you and your attorney arrive at, not a figure this product invents.

An informal, uncontested estate can close in the probate court once creditor claims are resolved, the accounting is prepared and distributions are ready. The closing statement, Form 4B-701 for a general estate or Form 4B-702 for a small one, may be filed no earlier than six months after appointment (NMSA 45-3-1003(A)). Unlike the inventory and the accounting, the closing statement is verified: it carries the words "I affirm under penalty of perjury under the laws of the State of New Mexico," an unsworn declaration under penalty of perjury, not a notarized oath. ExecutorLedger does not build the closing statement; it is the next step after the accounting this guide covers.

Two different "small estate" routes exist in New Mexico and they are not the same thing. Form 4B-702, the small-estate closing statement, tests the value of the entire estate against the family and personal property allowances, administration costs, and last-illness and funeral expenses. NMSA 45-3-1201 is a separate route, collection of property by affidavit without any administration at all, with its own dollar ceiling. Confirm the current figure with your attorney before relying on it; it has moved before.

A contested matter, a formal proceeding, supervised administration, or a question of heirship goes to the district court instead of the probate court, under NMSA 45-1-302. The 4B forms are the probate court's own forms; nothing here substitutes for district-court practice.

• Make sure the creditor-claims period has run and pay all valid claims, administration expenses, and taxes before filing anything to close the case.
• File a verified (sworn) closing statement under NMSA 1978 § 45-3-1003, New Mexico's informal, no-hearing closing route, available no earlier than 6 months after your original appointment.
• Send a copy of that closing statement to every distributee and to any known creditor whose claim is neither paid nor barred, and give the distributees whose interests are affected a full written account of your administration.
• If a will contest, a disputed account, or an uncooperative beneficiary is in play, petition the district court instead for formal proceedings terminating administration and an order of complete settlement under NMSA 1978 § 45-3-1001.
• Keep your file open until a year has passed after the closing statement is filed. Your appointment terminates automatically at that point if no proceedings involving you are pending.

New Mexico runs two tracks: routine, uncontested estates are opened and closed in the county Probate Court (probate judges are elected and need not be attorneys); anything contested, or a formal § 45-3-1001 settlement petition, goes to District Court instead.

Form 4B-601 prints six ruled rows and no total. ExecutorLedger adds a total of the estimated values below the form's own rows, because a reader needs one and the ledger has it, and the print says plainly that the approved form itself carries no total line. An asset with no date-of-death value on file prints as a blank, never as a manufactured $0.00, and is still counted among the items with a missing value.

The mortgage-or-lien column is ruled on the form, and ExecutorLedger records no encumbrance data, so every row's lien cell prints blank for the preparer to fill in. A lien is never netted against a value; the form keeps them in separate columns, and so does this one.

Form 4B-602's Cash and Other Assets side has four parts. Section A is items from the inventory that have not been sold and are still held. Section B is items received since the inventory was made, also not sold. Section C is items sold, and it is the only place a sale appears: an inventoried asset that has since been sold moves out of Section A and into Section C, never both. Section D is income received. The Payments and Distributions side has two parts: payments to creditors and for administration expenses, and distributions to devisees or heirs, cash and in-kind alike, because the form's own column is Value of Distribution.

Section C nets only the cost of the sale: Sales Price minus Sales Expense equals Net Amount Received. The item's inventory value never re-enters the calculation. There is no gain, no loss, and no comparison to what the asset was carried at. ExecutorLedger records no selling expense, so that column is ruled per row and the Net Amount Received equals the Sales Price until a preparer fills it in, and the print says so.

The form's own sentence says the two totals should be equal once the estate is wound up, because by then everything that came in has been paid out or distributed. While the estate still holds anything, and most estates being accounted for still do, the two totals will not match, and that is expected rather than an error. ExecutorLedger prints both totals exactly as the form does, prints the form's own sentence, and adds a note of its own explaining what the difference represents and that the form's own identity is met once everything has been paid out or distributed. Nothing here forces a distribution to make the numbers match.

Recording is free for as long as the estate takes: every receipt and disbursement with its date and description, distributions per beneficiary, and a balance that checks itself as you go. ExecutorLedger builds New Mexico-style documents from those records, an inventory shaped like Form 4B-601 and an accounting shaped like Form 4B-602, ready to transcribe onto the court's own forms when you send a copy or file one. Neither is a court form, and your attorney should review them before anything is signed or filed. Every document previews free with your real numbers, and $149 (one-time payment) per estate lifts the watermark. Usually less than one attorney hour, and typically reimbursable by the estate.