Departing Details Workbook
It’s January, the start of a new year, and hopefully the beginning of the end of the restrictions we’ve lived through for the last two years!
It’s time to take inventory:
What do we have?
What do we need?
What do we need to plan for?
It has been said that people spend more time planning a two-week vacation than for their retirement and estate needs. At Family Wealth Coach, a large part of our work centers on helping our clients navigate the tricky waters of a business transition, estate plan and/or a retirement strategy. We encourage all to create space in ones’ schedule to thoughtfully deal with these important issues, and there’s no better time than the present.
Today we want to focus on one important, but often neglected, element of a comprehensive estate plan. Most people think that if they have a will, a power of attorney and a personal directive in place they have completed their estate planning. Unfortunately, although very important, those three things represent a small portion of the issues that need to be discussed, decided or simply documented so that when the unthinkable happens your loved ones are not left with a mess.
Estate planning is not about death, it’s about organizing your life! We are aware of a couple of organizations who have created systems for compiling and updating the important information that your beneficiaries/executors need to more seamlessly deal with your estate. In this blog we will focus on the “Departing Details Workbook” created by Rosemary Pahl.
The Departing Details Workbook is a step-by-step collection system for organizing your life – including such things as your contact lists (banker, insurance, doctor etc.), passwords, funeral wishes, pet care; for a total of 25 topics organized in 25 tabs. What would otherwise be a very daunting project is set up to make the project simple and easy to complete. The Calgary based owners of Departing Details Workbook recently decided, after selling over 10,000 hardcopy and digital downloads in 23 countries, to restrict the online sales to just the digital download and offer it free of charge. Their mission is to help as many people as possible avoid the confusion, heartache, and stress caused by unmade decisions, lack of meaningful conversations with family, and basic things like undocumented passwords.
In order to access the workbook, copy paste their website to your browser estateworkbook.com and download your personal copy.
Please ensure you save it in your documents or the link will eventually be lost. You can choose to complete it on your computer and save the documents, or use the online forms and print the information for a binder. The creators would appreciate it if you would download each copy you want individually rather than copy and share as it allows the authors to track the volume of downloads and copies in circulation, which will confirm if their strategy of offering the workbook for free is working.
We know that you will be happy with your time spent on this initiative and your heirs and executors much happier still!
If you are getting stuck and need help formulating your plan, please reach out to any of us at Family Wealth Coach.
Good Luck!
403.410.6810
