If you and your spouse have no children, are retired and have a sizable estate, MarketWatch asks whether it is okay to use an attorney whom you hardly know to be the executor in "My wife and I don't trust anyone to be executor of our will."
While you are mulling over the executor issue, this is no excuse to table your planning. With both spouses still living, the planning should start right away.
Collect the information about important accounts and assets and keep it in a safe place at home or at your bank. Make sure you and your spouse know where these materials are located.
The best route is to have your spouse act as executor of your will with the help of a lawyer upon your death. As an alternative, an estate planning attorney can act as an executor. However, he or she will need to be paid.
The executor is required to act in your best interests. He or she must inventory the assets and coordinate cash for expenses, sales, and dealing with taxes.
There's no problem choosing an attorney you may not know personally, but you should do your research on www.lawyers.com and www.avvo.com. You can also ask friends for recommendations.
There are other, unforeseen issues you should take into account with your estate planning attorney—such as the unlikely event that both spouses pass simultaneously or a surviving spouse does not have mental capacity to handle his or her affairs. In such instance, you need an alternate executor, trustee, and/or power of attorney.
Finally, if you're actually making a will and know what you want to do with your money, then you are way ahead of most folks in the process.
Reference: MarketWatch (May 31, 2016) "My wife and I don't trust anyone to be executor of our will"