Every family that’s settled an estate tells the same story: the paperwork existed, but nobody knew where it was or what was missing. These guides are about fixing that — what to gather, what most people forget, and how to hand it over so the people you love never have to hunt.
The binder guide covers the container, the checklists cover what goes in it, and the accounts guide covers the part that never makes it onto paper.
A diagnosis takes a lot of decisions out of your hands — this one stays yours. What a mental-health advance directive is, why to write one while you’re well, and what to put in it. Comes with a free plain-language template you can fill in.
Section by section, what belongs in a death binder — wills, directives, the account map — plus the failure mode nobody mentions: the binder your family can’t find. Comes with a free ten-question inventory that scores your own gaps.
The artifact, not the explainer: six sections of checkboxes and blank lines you fill in on the page, then print. It is also the only one that covers what to leave out of the binder, and who should see which section.
The complete document checklist — wills, trusts, powers of attorney, healthcare directives, deeds, policies — and how to make sure the people who need them can actually find them.
What actually happens to bank accounts, email, subscriptions, and logins after death — and why paperless billing and autopay make estates invisible to the family settling them.
What a legacy contact can actually do, and the limit people are most often surprised by: they cannot log in and cannot read the messages. Memorializing versus deleting treated as the family decision it usually is, plus how to make a request, and how Instagram differs.
They keep charging, because nothing checks death records. The hard part is not cancelling, it is finding what exists: twelve months of statements, the inbox, and the two app-store registries. Plus what providers ask for, when to transfer rather than cancel, and why a stop payment on its own leaves the estate owing money.
Unlike Apple’s, this one cannot be invoked by your family after the fact. If it was never switched on, it does not exist for them. What it shares, how to choose the inactivity period without it firing during a hospitalization, and the one-way mistake to avoid if it was never set up.
Two-factor authentication sends the code to a locked phone, so the correct password gets your family nowhere. Where each kind of code actually goes, which of the partial fixes are worth setting up, and three things to do this week. With two estate attorneys on the record.
The exact menu path on iPhone and Mac, plus the part Apple states in its own documentation and nobody repeats: your iCloud Keychain is excluded, so your family inherits the photos and not the passwords. Also covers where the access key has to live, and the three-year expiry on the access itself.
For the person supporting someone, not the person diagnosed. How to raise a crisis plan while they are well, what to do if the answer is no, what being their health care agent actually asks of you, and where the plan has to live to be any use at 2am.
For after it has happened. Grouped by when things are actually due rather than by topic: the first 48 hours, the first two weeks, and the first six months, plus what people wrongly rush. One page, printable, no signup.
A finished binder or checklist is one of the kindest things you can leave the people you love. But a binder in a drawer only works if your family knows it exists, where it lives, and whether it’s current — and only after someone is there to open it.
That’s the gap Trusted Directive exists for: a secure vault today, with Gap Discovery alerts for which documents are missing and a Verify-Silence Release Protocol so your Trusted Contacts can reach what you’ve prepared in an emergency — incapacity included, not just death — both in development for alpha.
Not sure what you’re missing? Start with the estate planning checklist.
Join the waitlist and your invite lands the day Trusted Directive opens. No spam, no surprise renewals — the price is $120 year one, $60 a year after, and we say so everywhere.
Join the waitlist — your invite lands the day we open.