What Your Executor NEEDS to Know

We live in an age when everything about us seems to be public. Facebook has our pictures, the pictures of our kids, our cats, where we go, and who our friends are. Computer hackers have our e-mail addresses, our social security numbers and our deepest secrets (if we ever worked for the government). So it’s only natural that we try to hold on to as much of our privacy as possible. Unfortunately, that means that the people who we appoint to take care of our affairs after our death are often in the dark.

Here is how one on man described the situation when he asked his sister where her estate planning documents were.

Years ago, my sister named me as her personal representative, but she hadn’t given me copies of any of her estate-planning documents. Eventually, I took a trip to Phoenix to visit her and my brother-in-law, in part to discuss this very topic with her. When I asked her where she kept the documents, she led me into the guest bedroom. She opened the door to the closet, bent down and uncovered a well-camouflaged “secret compartment” in the carpeted floor. In the compartment was a locked metal box with a combination lock.
I looked at her incredulously and asked how she could expect me to be able to open the box without knowing the combination. “Oh, you’ll find that in the butter dish in the fridge,” she told me.
There was no way I would’ve found the lockbox under the trapdoor in the closet in an obscure room of her house — not to mention the combination. In fact, I wasn’t even sure I’d be able to get into her house, which was in a gated community with a coded keypad.

We have experienced similar situations many times and it is one of the reasons we wrote BEFORE I GO and the accompanying workbook.

You executor needs to know where your important papers are, how to get to them, how to access bank and investment records and any important computer files. If you do not leave them with clear instructions, you are running a huge risk that either your wishes won’t be followed or that you will have created a huge burden on your executor and cost them precious time and additional stress.

If you are interested in our guide book, you can download the first three chapters of BEFORE I GO for free by going HERE.