It has remained on my to do list for the past, oh, seven years or so. We have insured our lives against the unthinkable, saved for the unimaginable, and invested for the inevitable, but we haven’t hammered out a will. Deciding to draft a will makes perfect sense to me, but I always get to that question, ‘where do I start?’ and then I see some cute kittens on the Facebook and get distracted. Okay, I’m not that easily distracted (hang on, someone’s texting me….)
Where was I? Oh yes, will power. Since this is a recurring discussion in our household, I thought the process might be useful to my dozen or so readers (thanks Mom). So, I’ve decided to take a journey into the how to of writing a will for us and hopefully it will shed some welcome light on the subject for others too. I’ll be meeting with some Beijing based experts, but also looking into online solutions that might be as simple as cutting and pasting into a document, filling in the blanks, and then getting things notarized by a lawyer. However, living abroad also adds a layer of complications that hopefully can be easily sorted.
For us, I found a great place to get started was the cheekily named getyourshittogether.org website that was started by a woman whose life was devastated by her husband’s death in a car accident in 2009. She found that since their legal and financial affairs were not organized prior to his death, life for her and her children was greatly complicated afterwards and she spent months trying to get things sorted out. She created the website to raise awareness and make it easier for people to get organized in life so that death is less traumatic and stressful. If you have been putting off getting your own financial house in order, the site is a good place to get a simple checklist of what you should do and to get started.
Photo courtesy of Ken_Mayer (Flickr)
