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Comment by tbran | Hacker News Reader

Check out Get Your Shit Together [0]. It was started by a woman who lost her husband in an accident, suddenly becoming a widow and single mom to two young children.

She has abridged [1] and long checklists [2] that everyone should complete. Most of us probably don't even think about these things:

- will

- power of attorney (in varying forms)

- what happens to pets

- what happens to kids

- money

- burial/funeral wishes

- insurance

- living will

- etc.

[0]: https://getyourshittogether.org/

[1]: https://getyourshittogether.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/G...

[2]: https://getyourshittogether.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/G...

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Any competent estate attorney will do this for you.

Key word: ESTATE attorney. Preferably belonging to a large and well respected firm. Don't get just any attorney willing to do it, they won't be equipped for it and shit will go wrong, and things going wrong in the legal world is potentially catastrophic. For you, your family and anyone within a 1000 feet of you.

This is a bit extreme. An estate-planning attorney at any sized firm can do a good job, and using an attorney is good. But wills, trusts, etc. are well-established areas of law, to the extent that in the U.S. at least, anyone can scratch out a perfectly legal will on a piece of notebook paper.

They don't do it for you. They run the paperwork when you do it. You have to make all the important decisions.

You can use Nolo or Rocket for most of it (and you should, at least bforna first draft, because the expensive attorney is doing the same thing, like H&R Block or an accountant for taxes). Try to save their time for complex stuff; they will be happy to charge $hundreds/hr for data entry eqivalent of running TurboTax.

Indeed. It's not cheap, but it's mostly a one-time cost* and the big binder we have that covers all sorts of scenarios and contingencies offers us considerable peace of mind. If you have enough assets that anyone would bother fighting over them**, it's worth doing.

* Not including divorces or if you change how you want to do things.

** If you haven't been involved in settling an estate, that bar is probably far lower than you'd expect.

Indeed, mine covered all this when I last updated my will.

Thank you for sharing this.

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