Estate preparation checklist — not a legal document

Estate Planning Checklist

Answer as much as you want to, and get a checklist of what to gather and who to ask — with every task traced back to the answer that put it there.

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These are preparation materials. This page organises what you already know so you can talk it over with someone qualified. It does not create, change or check a will, a trust, a power of attorney, a directive or a beneficiary form, and nothing here is legal advice.

What you want to sort out

Answer as much or as little as you like. Every task the list adds because of an answer tells you which answer put it there.

Recorded so you can raise it with someone qualified there. It changes nothing on this page.
How amounts are shown back to you.

What are you trying to do?

Is there anything here you want to talk about?

“Not sure” is a real answer. It keeps the subject on your list instead of dropping it.

Your checklist

Written to be usable anywhere. Estate law differs by country and often within one — the Philippines, the United States and everywhere else each have their own rules about what a document must look like, who must inherit, and how an estate is settled. So nothing in these tools changes based on where you are. The country you record is context to raise with a professional there, and the words below are the ones you may meet, not a statement of what applies to you.
How this list is built

The six tasks at the top are on every list, because every kind of preparation needs them: find the documents, list what you have, ask each provider what they hold, decide who to talk to, write down the questions you cannot answer, and take it all to someone qualified.

Everything below them came from an answer you gave, and says which one. If you answer “not sure”, the subject does not disappear — it becomes a task to decide whether it applies to you, because a question nobody ever settles is how something gets missed.

The count is of tasks you have marked done. It is not a measure of whether your affairs are in order, and tasks you mark “not applicable” come out of the total rather than counting against you. If nothing applies, it says so rather than showing you a hundred per cent.

Words you may meet