Estate planning organizer

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FBN2014
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Estate planning organizer

Post by FBN2014 »

I would like to organize all my estate planning documents, investment accounts details, bank accounts details, house deed, insurance policies, funeral arrangements, online accounts and passwords, etc. in one binder or organizer so when I and/or my wife die that my wife or children could open the binder and be able to administer the estate. Does anyone know if such a product exists?
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sailaway
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Re: Estate planning organizer

Post by sailaway »

You mean a three ring binder with plastic sheets to insert each document into?
HomeStretch
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Re: Estate planning organizer

Post by HomeStretch »

Or a heavy duty expanding file with multiple pockets.
Last edited by HomeStretch on Thu Feb 11, 2021 7:54 am, edited 1 time in total.
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GerryL
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Re: Estate planning organizer

Post by GerryL »

I am using the Nolo "Get It Together" guide for document organization. You can buy a binder and tabs to accompany the book, but I am using my own binders. And on Amazon I found a 31-tab set from Avery that I will use for the 28 sections in the book. Just getting started, but I intend to get loose-leaf pockets to hold materials in some sections.

The book guides you through the process of organizing all your records, and you can use the paper forms provided in the book or download digital versions. I am filling them out digitally and will print them to put in the binder. That way I can update the digital file and reprint as needed.
fourwheelcycle
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Re: Estate planning organizer

Post by fourwheelcycle »

I use an electronic estate planning organizer to assure all of our important estate and financial documents, plus my own lucid advisory comments, will be available to my wife and our adult children if I should die or become mentally incapacitated. It has at least 28 sections, all clearly labelled. It resides in my computer and in a securely encrypted cloud storage and backup site called Sync.com. Every time I add a new document, or make changes to existing documents, like our financial information, the changes are instantly reflected in the cloud version of my estate planning organizer that resides in the Sync.com cloud.

Although a paper version of my organizer could be stolen from our house, or burned in a fire, and would have to be physically accessed by our children who live in distant states, my wife and our children can access my electronic organizer on my computer, or in the Sync.com cloud, immediately, as long as they know the right passwords to log-in to my computer or my Sync.com account. Regarding passwords, I don't have to keep actual copies of our home and auto insurance policies in the organizer, or copies of our Social Security, Medicare, and Medicare supplemental insurance records, or copies of my pension provisions for my wife to receive half of my pension if I die. All these records already exist in various website files that are accessible from my 1Password password vault, which is also stored and continuously updated in my computer's organizer and in the Sync.com cloud.
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abuss368
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Re: Estate planning organizer

Post by abuss368 »

sailaway wrote: Wed Feb 10, 2021 10:20 pm You mean a three ring binder with plastic sheets to insert each document into?
This is what I did. Spouse appreciates the simplicity.

Tony
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bengal22
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Re: Estate planning organizer

Post by bengal22 »

I have a one pager that lists assets and point of contact. It's my death book.
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UnLearnYourself
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Re: Estate planning organizer

Post by UnLearnYourself »

fourwheelcycle wrote: Thu Feb 11, 2021 6:54 am I use an electronic estate planning organizer to assure all of our important estate and financial documents, plus my own lucid advisory comments, will be available to my wife and our adult children if I should die or become mentally incapacitated. It has at least 28 sections, all clearly labelled. It resides in my computer and in a securely encrypted cloud storage and backup site called Sync.com. Every time I add a new document, or make changes to existing documents, like our financial information, the changes are instantly reflected in the cloud version of my estate planning organizer that resides in the Sync.com cloud.

Although a paper version of my organizer could be stolen from our house, or burned in a fire, and would have to be physically accessed by our children who live in distant states, my wife and our children can access my electronic organizer on my computer, or in the Sync.com cloud, immediately, as long as they know the right passwords to log-in to my computer or my Sync.com account. Regarding passwords, I don't have to keep actual copies of our home and auto insurance policies in the organizer, or copies of our Social Security, Medicare, and Medicare supplemental insurance records, or copies of my pension provisions for my wife to receive half of my pension if I die. All these records already exist in various website files that are accessible from my 1Password password vault, which is also stored and continuously updated in my computer's organizer and in the Sync.com cloud.
Good work Dad. Is the 'electronic estate planning organizer' a specific product/software, or have you organized your own electronic system?
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JoeRetire
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Re: Estate planning organizer

Post by JoeRetire »

FBN2014 wrote: Wed Feb 10, 2021 10:17 pm I would like to organize all my estate planning documents, investment accounts details, bank accounts details, house deed, insurance policies, funeral arrangements, online accounts and passwords, etc. in one binder or organizer so when I and/or my wife die that my wife or children could open the binder and be able to administer the estate. Does anyone know if such a product exists?
I use a hanging file in my credenza and copies in my safe deposit box at the bank.
This isn't just my wallet. It's an organizer, a memory and an old friend.
cjcerny
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Re: Estate planning organizer

Post by cjcerny »

The AARP has a free estate planning organizer PDF that can be downloaded from their website.
fourwheelcycle
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Re: Estate planning organizer

Post by fourwheelcycle »

UnLearnYourself wrote: Thu Feb 11, 2021 7:30 am
fourwheelcycle wrote: Thu Feb 11, 2021 6:54 am I use an electronic estate planning organizer .....
Is the 'electronic estate planning organizer' a specific product/software, or have you organized your own electronic system?
It is just a folder in my computer, with sub-folders for Finances, Wills and Joint Revocable Trust, POAs, Advance Directives, Passwords, How to Manage and Distribute Our Estate, etc. The whole folder syncs to my Sync.com cloud account every time I make a change to any file in the overall folder.

As noted in another thread, the signed originals of our estate documents are stored in a safe at our attorney's office (a large firm in our town). Our attorney gave us high quality PDFs of each signed original. The PDFs are in my estate documents folder.

Since one of our adult children is our successor trustee, I used Adobe to turn the PDF of our signed revocable trust into a Word document, then I added contrasting color annotations throughout the trust to explain things like "You will need to help Mom file an IRS Form 706 to claim my DSUE when I die" or "You will have to file a tax return for our estate for any year during which our estate earns more than $600 in interest or dividends after we die".
Breezy
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Re: Estate planning organizer

Post by Breezy »

fourwheelcycle wrote: Thu Feb 11, 2021 6:54 am I use an electronic estate planning organizer to assure all of our important estate and financial documents, plus my own lucid advisory comments, will be available to my wife and our adult children if I should die or become mentally incapacitated. It has at least 28 sections, all clearly labelled. It resides in my computer and in a securely encrypted cloud storage and backup site called Sync.com. Every time I add a new document, or make changes to existing documents, like our financial information, the changes are instantly reflected in the cloud version of my estate planning organizer that resides in the Sync.com cloud.

Although a paper version of my organizer could be stolen from our house, or burned in a fire, and would have to be physically accessed by our children who live in distant states, my wife and our children can access my electronic organizer on my computer, or in the Sync.com cloud, immediately, as long as they know the right passwords to log-in to my computer or my Sync.com account. Regarding passwords, I don't have to keep actual copies of our home and auto insurance policies in the organizer, or copies of our Social Security, Medicare, and Medicare supplemental insurance records, or copies of my pension provisions for my wife to receive half of my pension if I die. All these records already exist in various website files that are accessible from my 1Password password vault, which is also stored and continuously updated in my computer's organizer and in the Sync.com cloud.
Do you use Sync.com like a person would use ICloud, for instance, and back up a lot/everything, or do you use it for your limited but critical information? I hadn’t heard of it before & it seems potentially very useful.
Hockey10
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Re: Estate planning organizer

Post by Hockey10 »

Sounds like Taylor's blue binder:

viewtopic.php?t=198919
fourwheelcycle
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Re: Estate planning organizer

Post by fourwheelcycle »

Breezy wrote: Thu Feb 11, 2021 9:04 am
fourwheelcycle wrote: Thu Feb 11, 2021 6:54 am I use an electronic estate planning organizer ....
Do you use Sync.com like a person would use ICloud, for instance, and back up a lot/everything, or do you use it for your limited but critical information? I hadn’t heard of it before & it seems potentially very useful.
Sync.com provides a free account for up to 6GB of files. My entire estate folder is only 3GB. I started out with a free account, but after the first year I saw how great it worked to keep files synced and backed-up (with versioning) between my computer and my Sync.com account, so now I pay $50 per year for 500GB of files. That is enough for all of my User files, including about 80GB of photos and 15GB of music, plus all of my wife's User files on her computers.

Sync.com lets you sync up to five devices for a single account, and you can mix and match which folders and files are synced to each device. My estate folder, including all of our family finance records ad spreadsheets, and my 1Password vault, are only synced to my computers (one desktop and two laptops). My wife's personal folders and her 1Password vault are only synced to her desktop and laptop. Our Photos, Music, and Recipes folders are synced to all five devices. Sync.com uses "zero knowledge" encryption, so our unencrypted data and even our Sync.com password never leave our local computers (which are also encrypted in case they are ever stolen). Except for the unrealistic possibility of brute-force attack, there is no way our Sync.com files could ever be unencrypted by a hacker or even an inside employee of Sync.com.

Compared to Sync.com, I am just not comfortable with the privacy provisions and hacking susceptibility of large cloud sites like iCloud or Google Drive. I am not a computer pro, so my privacy concerns may be unfounded, but I am personally more comfortable with Sync.com.
Phil DeMuth
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Re: Estate planning organizer

Post by Phil DeMuth »

I bought a Ouija Board and told them to contact me for any information they need.
TonyDAntonio
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Re: Estate planning organizer

Post by TonyDAntonio »

My mom, who was not financially savvy, typed a single page, three separate times on a manual typewriter (a copy for each of her children), titled Things To Do When Mom Dies. This was in the early 2000s. It made things much easier when she died in 2010. It contained names, phone numbers, account numbers, etc. of everything she could think of. Your heirs will appreciate such a thing and not only use it but treasure it.

And yes, I teared up writing this.
Stoic9
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Re: Estate planning organizer

Post by Stoic9 »

bengal22 wrote: Thu Feb 11, 2021 7:23 am I have a one pager that lists assets and point of contact. It's my death book.
Excellent....mine is a notebook but it is titled Dead Book!
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FIREchief
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Re: Estate planning organizer

Post by FIREchief »

I am not a lawyer, accountant or financial advisor. Any advice or suggestions that I may provide shall be considered for entertainment purposes only.
neowiser
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Re: Estate planning organizer

Post by neowiser »

Last night the evening news had a segment on a middle-aged couple who both nearly died from COVID at the same time. As they recovered they said their immediate priority was to arrange their affairs to make things easier for their son. Coincidentally, a relative of this couple had just written a book on the topic https://www.amazon.com/Case-You-Get-Hit ... 1523510471 .

Here is the news clip on the topic:
https://dfw.cbslocal.com/video/5280160- ... -prepared/
vetris
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Re: Estate planning organizer

Post by vetris »

I'd highly recommend the ICE binder from here: https://smartmoneymamas.com/ice-binder/. It costs some, but it's very well laid out and you can either save it off digitally or print it out and fill it in.
FoolStreet
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Re: Estate planning organizer

Post by FoolStreet »

Does anyone recommend an spreadsheet version to track all the assets and docs with instructions etc. just getting all that stuff compiled before giving it to the lawyers is a big effort.
mhalley
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Re: Estate planning organizer

Post by mhalley »

FoolStreet
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Re: Estate planning organizer

Post by FoolStreet »

mhalley wrote: Sat Feb 13, 2021 9:37 pm This google doc looks pretty good.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... sp=sharing
This looks great! Thank you
megabad
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Re: Estate planning organizer

Post by megabad »

fourwheelcycle wrote: Thu Feb 11, 2021 9:58 am ...even our Sync.com password never leave our local computers (which are also encrypted in case they are ever stolen)...
Doesn’t this mean that your files would only be accessible on your computer? Not sure how sync.com works, but normally the website password must “leave your computer” but the encryption key doesn’t have to. I do this with a number of cloud services. Basically I encrypt before I upload. I really couldn’t care less who has access to the websites because no one is going to take the time to crack that encryption.

PS. My estate stuff is 100% paper though. And nearly 100% secure.
fourwheelcycle
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Re: Estate planning organizer

Post by fourwheelcycle »

megabad wrote: Sat Feb 13, 2021 10:11 pm
fourwheelcycle wrote: Thu Feb 11, 2021 9:58 am ...even our Sync.com password never leaves our local computers (which are also encrypted in case they are ever stolen)...
Doesn’t this mean that your files would only be accessible on your computer? Not sure how sync.com works, but normally the website password must “leave your computer” but the encryption key doesn’t have to. I do this with a number of cloud services. Basically I encrypt before I upload. I really couldn’t care less who has access to the websites because no one is going to take the time to crack that encryption.

PS. My estate stuff is 100% paper though. And nearly 100% secure.
Sync.com and 1Password both utilize their own variations of zero knowledge encryption. You can read a third party explanation of zero knowledge encryption here: https://www.cloudwards.net/what-exactly ... s-it-work/

You can also read Wikipedia's interesting history and explanation of zero knowledge proof here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof At the bottom of the wiki article there is a link to a related article on zero knowledge passwords.

My layman's understanding is that when I sign up for a Sync.com or 1Password.com account, the app I download and install on my computer includes an encryption protocol that relies on a secret "key" to encode or decode encrypted data stored in the Sync.com or 1Password.com clouds (servers).

For Sync.com the "secret key" is my password. If A is my password, B is the encryption protocol (now downloaded to my computer), and C is my data, each time I want to send data from my computer to Sync.com the data is first encrypted, in my computer, using my password as the encryption key. Only encrypted data leaves my computer to be stored in or Sync.com's clouds. Without my secret key, even Sync.com's IT staff cannot decode my data. Similarly, when I want to retrieve data from Sync.com only my encrypted data travels back to my computer. The data is decrypted in my computer, using a decryption protocol that requires my password as the secret key to enable decryption.

An important downside of zero knowledge encryption, which everyone is aware of due to stories about Bitcoin, is that if you forget or lose your secret key you have also lost access to your data - permanently! Since 1Password.com, Sync.com, and Bitcoin never see your actual password you cannot ask them to retrieve it for you, or let you reset it, if you lose it or forget it.

You might think your simple password, like "megabad8957$" could be decrypted using a brute force attack (a computer routine that tries millions of letter, number, symbol combinations). Actually, 1Password, Sync.com, and Bitcoin don't rely on your password as the "real" secret key. Their encryption protocols, in your computer, turn your password into a much longer secret encryption key that only resides in your computer.

Sync.com describes this step as "During account creation, a unique private key is generated and encrypted with 256 bit AES GCM, locked with the user’s password. This takes place client-side, within the web browser or app. PBKDF2 key stretching with a high iteration count is used to help make weak passwords more cryptographically secure." 1Password calls the "stretched" encryption key they create with your password your "Secret Key". It is about 34 characters long, presumably too long for any brute force attack. I don't know how Bitcoin creates their "client side" encryption key, but we have all read stories about Bitcoin owners who have accidentally lost or erased the computer drive or backup drive that contains their Bitcoin access code, causing them to lose access to their Bitcoin records forever.

PS. I understand some banks and brokers will now let you hold and trade Bitcoins. I wonder if these banks and brokers are setting up their Bitcoin account records as "zero knowledge", like Bitcoin's own access records, or if the banks will store owners' Bitcoin records less securely, allowing clients to access their Bitcoin records with regular bank or broker sign-in passwords. Typically, bank and broker sign-in passwords can be retrieved or reset, so they are not zero knowledge.
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Kagord
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Re: Estate planning organizer

Post by Kagord »

Not a fan if digital vaults, or even keeping at home. Cough up the $35/year and throw it all in a safe deposit box, the more messy it is, the more time they will be spending on that than grieving, just my 2 cents here, even more so if the key can't be found.

Bonus points for keeping early copies, and all amendments and restated copy history, with hand written codecils sprinkled here and there.
Last edited by Kagord on Sun Feb 14, 2021 11:42 am, edited 1 time in total.
aristotelian
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Re: Estate planning organizer

Post by aristotelian »

Shared folder in Google Docs plus a file cabinet.
Last edited by aristotelian on Sun Feb 14, 2021 11:43 am, edited 1 time in total.
InMyDreams
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Re: Estate planning organizer

Post by InMyDreams »

This website was started by a young woman who was widowed at a young age. Apologies to Mods for the website's name, but it is what it is
https://getyourshittogether.org/checklist/

I confess that I haven't made use of it (I listened to an interview she had done).
GAAP
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Re: Estate planning organizer

Post by GAAP »

InMyDreams wrote: Sun Feb 14, 2021 11:42 am This website was started by a young woman who was widowed at a young age. Apologies to Mods for the website's name, but it is what it is
https://getyourshittogether.org/checklist/

I confess that I haven't made use of it (I listened to an interview she had done).
Very similar item is https://www.erikdewey.com/bigbookmkIIIa.pdf.
“Adapt what is useful, reject what is useless, and add what is specifically your own.” ― Bruce Lee
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