Write It Down Before Someone Else Has To

I've closed somewhere around 400 estates in my career. In that time I've seen wills, trusts, powers of attorney, beneficiary forms, property deeds, business agreements, and a remarkable variety of things people thought counted as legal documents but didn't.

The document I've seen missing most often isn't the will. It's the Letter of Instruction.

A Letter of Instruction isn’t a legal document. It has no official format. No notary required. No lawyer needed.

It’s just a piece of paper — or a document on your computer — where you write down everything the people you love will need to know when you’re gone. Where your accounts are. What your passwords are. Where the insurance policies live. Who to call. What you want done with specific things. What you don’t want done.

It takes about two hours to write. Most people never do it.

What happens without one

Your family spends weeks — sometimes months — trying to reconstruct what you knew. They call banks. They search drawers. They find things that raise more questions than answers. They argue about what you would have wanted because nobody wrote it down.

I’ve watched this happen in orderly houses and chaotic ones. It has nothing to do with how organized a person was. It has everything to do with whether they ever sat down and wrote the thing.

A note from Martin

I've been asked many times if there's a good place to start with this. My honest answer: don't overthink the format. Open a Google Doc, title it "For whoever needs this," and start with your bank accounts. Add one thing every Sunday until it's done. It doesn't have to be perfect — it has to exist.

The Letter of Instruction won’t solve everything. No document does.

But it’s the difference between a family that spends three months guessing and a family that spends three weeks closing. That’s not a small difference, when you’re the one going through it.

— Martin, Cincinnati OH