How Beneficiaries Bid on Estate Assets in Celestial Divide

The bidding process is how each beneficiary communicates what they actually want from the estate. Here's what to expect — from the first screen to finalized bids.

What This Guide Covers

• The beneficiary homepage and what to configure before bidding
• How the bidding page works
• Setting bids with the slider or manual entry
• Signaling when you don't want an asset
• Reviewing and finalizing bids
• What happens after everyone is done

Before You Start: The Beneficiary Homepage

When a beneficiary logs into Celestial Divide, the homepage offers a few configuration options worth setting before heading into the bidding page.

Income information — enter relevant income details that may inform how assets are allocated relative to your financial situation.

Financial preferences — indicate your comfort level with debt. You can specify whether you're willing to take on debt to acquire assets, or whether you'd prefer to avoid it entirely. You can also bring in cash contributions if you want to make offers that go beyond your proportional share.

Bid visibility — this setting controls whether the executor can see a detailed view of your bidding activity. Once the executor kicks off the bidding process, you have seven days to complete your bids. This setting determines how visible your progress is to the person managing the estate.

The Bidding Page

Once you enter the bidding page, you'll see every asset in the estate listed out. For each one, you'll find:

• Name and description — a clear label and brief description of the asset
• Good faith estimate — a baseline value that anchors the asset in the system. This is the reference point your bids are measured against

Each asset has a slider to set your bid. The slider moves as a percentage of the good faith estimate, so you can express whether you value an asset above, at, or below the baseline. If you need more precision than the slider allows, you can type in a number directly.

There are floors built into the system. For real estate in particular, the floor accounts for costs like realtor fees, taxes, and other transaction expenses. Those minimums exist to keep bids grounded in the practical economics of what an asset actually costs to transfer.

Work through each asset in the list at whatever pace makes sense. There's no required order.

Signaling That You Don't Want an Asset

For any asset you have no interest in, you can indicate that you don't want it. This isn't just a zero bid — it's a signal to the system that there's no demand for this asset from you.

That information matters. When no beneficiary wants a particular asset, the system uses that signal to identify what might be sold to generate liquidity. Rather than forcing an unwanted asset into someone's allocation, Celestial Divide can route the proceeds from a sale toward balancing the overall distribution.

Reviewing and Finalizing Bids

When you've worked through every asset, you'll reach a summary screen to review your bids before submitting. Take a moment here — this is your last easy chance to catch anything before it's locked in.

When you're ready to submit, there's a brief undo window after finalization — similar to the "undo send" feature in email. If you catch something in the final seconds, you can pull back and make a correction before the bid is officially submitted.

Once submitted, your bids are binding.

What Happens Next

When all beneficiaries have finalized their bids, the executor or personal representative receives a notification. At that point, they'll initiate the solve — the process where Celestial Divide works out how to divide the estate's assets based on everyone's bids.

That step gets its own dedicated guide.

Celestial Divide is estate asset division software built for professionals. It helps executors, estate attorneys, trust officers, and family law practitioners manage asset allocation, document every decision, and produce defensible outcomes — without spreadsheets or manual negotiation.