01
The Paperwork
The legal spine: the documents that let your wishes count, whether they’re current, and whether the people named in them have actually agreed.
One payment. Yours forever.
The Before Kit
Everything they’d need, gathered while it’s still easy.
The will. The accounts. What you’d want if you couldn’t say it yourself. The stories behind the things that matter. The Before Kit is where you put it, twenty minutes at a time, so the people you love are never left guessing.
$49 USD Instant download.
Get The Before KitA digital guide with planning sheets, templates, and tools. Yours to keep, at your own pace.
Before you keep reading
If something happened tonight, would they know?
A few questions worth sitting with, just for a second.
- Where your will is, and whether there is one
- How to get into your phone
- Which bills would keep auto-paying, and which ones should stop
- Who’d take the dog for a walk this weekend, and every weekend after
- What you’d want done medically, if you couldn’t say so yourself
- How to get into twenty years of photos
- What should happen to your Facebook page
- Who to call first
- Why your grandfather’s watch was always meant for your niece
If you paused on even one of those, this is for you.
Phone and access
Not a binder. Not a vault. Not a password dump.
It never asks you for a password.
Twenty years ago, families searched filing cabinets. Now they search for a passcode. Your phone has quietly become the control centre of your life: your bank, your photos, your bills, the people you love. Most planning templates ask you to type all of that into a spreadsheet, logins included. That’s the single most dangerous thing a planning product can do. Documents get copied, synced, emailed, and backed up in places you’ll never see.
The Before Kit asks a different question: where does access live? The name of your password manager. A sealed envelope in the fire safe. A printed emergency kit. The sheets are built so the answer is always a location, never a secret, and the guide walks you through setting up one real front door your person can actually reach.
It’s the difference between a plan that helps your family and a plan that’s a liability sitting in your cloud drive.
The hardest week
The week after
This week asks something different of you.
The day someone dies is its own kind of hard, and nothing here is meant to rank it against anything else. But the days that follow often ask for something most people don’t expect: not grief, but logistics, layered right on top of it. This is what families actually spend that week doing:
- Turning the house over looking for the will, because nobody knows if there is one.
- Locked out of the phone, which holds the two-factor codes for everything else.
- Twenty years of photos behind a password nobody has.
- Subscriptions billing for eleven months because no one knew they existed.
- An adult child guessing at whether their parent wanted a burial or a cremation, and carrying that guess for the rest of their life.
- Someone learning they’re the executor at the funeral, from a lawyer, having never been asked.
- It’s the conversation where someone finally says, “I thought you knew.” And someone else quietly answers, “I thought you did.”
Those aren’t legal problems. They’re human ones. And every one of them is preventable.
The difference
Two very different weeks.
Here’s what changes when the answers are already written down.
| Without the kit | With the kit |
|---|---|
| A safety deposit box key with no idea which bank it belongs to | Named: the bank, the branch, and who’s holding the key |
| A dog with nobody sure who’s feeding her that first night | Named, with her vet, her food, and her routine |
| Guessing which password manager you used, if any | Where access lives, written down once, no passwords included |
| Learning they’re the executor from a lawyer’s phone call | The people who’d step in, already asked, already agreed |
| “I think this is what she would have wanted” | Her words, in her own handwriting |
The real difference isn’t the paperwork. It’s a family that gets to connect and care for each other that week, instead of running an administrative scavenger hunt.
Planning isn’t about preparing for death. It’s about continuing to care.
We spend our whole lives looking after the people we love. We make soup when they’re sick. We leave notes on the counter. We text to make sure they got home. This is just one more way of doing that, written down instead of said out loud.
What’s actually in it
Eight sections. One clear place to begin.
Eight sections, matching the eight areas of the free Fare-Well Readiness Review. If you’ve taken the review, you already know which folder to open first.
02
Money and the Bills
Not your balances. Findability. What exists, where the doors are, and every subscription that would otherwise bill for a year.
03
Access
The master map, plus the honest five-item test: could your person find your will, your ID, your phone plan, this kit, and your lawyer, this week, without calling anyone?
04
Digital Life
Devices, accounts, photos, and what happens to your online presence. Includes the free legacy settings worth turning on today.
05
The People Who’d Step In
The first calls, in the order you’d want them made, and the messages you’d want passed along.
06
Who Depends on You
The people, the pets, and the business. The care plans a will never holds.
07
Care and Medical Wishes
Who speaks for you if you can’t, and what you’d want them to say. So they’re answering, not guessing.
08
Wishes, Values, and What’s Left Behind
The part most checklists skip. Your gathering, your objects, and the stories that turn a thermos into your grandfather’s thermos.
The Readiness Review is a free, ten-minute assessment covering these same eight areas. Take the review.
The part nobody else has
A dashboard that shows you where you stand.
Mark each piece Handled, Partly, or Not yet on the Where Things Stand worksheet, and the bars fill in on their own. No scores. No grades. No confetti. The same plain language as your Readiness Review, so you always know what’s done and what’s next.
This is the piece people pay a yearly subscription for elsewhere. Here it’s one worksheet you own outright, and “Doesn’t apply” is a real answer that never counts against you.
A guide beside you
It tells you how, not just what.
This isn’t a typical planner that hands you a blank grid and wishes you luck. It’s more like having a trusted guide sitting beside you, walking you through one section at a time, telling you exactly what’s worth adding and why it matters before you write a word.
Every sheet opens with a plain-English explanation, and a greyed-out example row so you can see the expected format instead of staring at an empty grid. It’s the kind of thing you finish with a cup of tea in one hand and a square of chocolate in the other, twenty minutes at a time, in your own order.
Also included
There are things no legal document can hold.
The story behind your wedding ring. The recipe everyone asks you to make. The letter you’ve been meaning to write. The Before Kit makes room for those too, not just the paperwork.
The Final Folder
The one folder built for someone else’s hands, including the first-hours letter you write now and they open later.
A no-stress will guide
How to get a real will done, without drama or a second mortgage.
Digital legacy checklist
The free legacy settings at Apple, Google, and Facebook, and how to switch them on.
The Digital Vault
Free tools for sending letters, photos, and videos into the future, easily, and at no extra cost.
Conversations That Matter guide
Prompts for the talks that make the practical planning easier, and the words worth saying while you can.
Afterloss checklist
For the other side of this kit: a steady list for the person walking the first weeks after a death.
Own it forever
You’re planning for a day when the subscription’s stopped, or the binder’s out of date.
Estate-planning apps charge yearly for a vault that disappears when the company folds or the card expires. Binders from the bookstore go out of date the moment you switch banks, and once a page gets scribbled over enough times, a family stops trusting what it says. Paper doesn’t survive everything either: a binder isn’t fireproof, and it isn’t floodproof.
The Before Kit is different. It’s files you own, not a login you rent. They open in Google Sheets, Apple Numbers, or your usual spreadsheet program, work offline, and they’ll still open in thirty years. Change a bank in ten seconds. Search instead of flipping pages. Print any sheet for a binder if you still want one, and keep the digital copy current.
You’ll also get one email a year, a plain nudge to open the Where Things Stand worksheet and check what’s changed. New bank, new password manager, someone new in the picture, whatever it is. No fee attached. It’s not a subscription, it’s a reminder that the kit only works if it stays true.
There’s no perfect week for this
Twenty minutes today is worth more than the perfect week you’re waiting for.
Not when things settle down. Not right after the holidays. Not once retirement finally slows the calendar. Most families don’t get the version where there’s finally enough time. They get the version where someone starts searching.
What you’re really giving them is permission to grieve instead of investigate. To remember instead of search.
The Before Kit
$49 USD
One payment, yours forever.
- 18 branded planning sheets across 8 sections
- Where Things Stand worksheet
- The Before Kit Guide
- The Final Folder and the first-hours letter
- Six bonus guides and writing tools
- Download it, or use the Google Sheets version
- Free updates for life
- One email a year, reminding you to check what’s changed
Instant download. Works on Mac, Windows, and in Google Drive.
If you open it, work through a section, and it hasn’t made a real difference to how prepared you feel, email me within 30 days and I’ll refund you. No form to fill out.
Questions people ask
A few things worth knowing.
How long does this take?
Nobody finishes it in a weekend, and nobody needs to. It’s built for twenty minutes at a time: one sheet, one cup of tea, one sitting. Half-finished still helps enormously, because a gap you’ve named is a plan.
What software do I need?
None, really. The sheets open in Google Sheets or Apple Numbers, and there’s a ready-made Google Drive version if you’d rather work online, with a one-page walkthrough for copying it into your own Drive. Your usual spreadsheet program works fine too.
Is this a will?
No, and it’s honest about that throughout. It’s the organizing system that sits alongside your legal documents. Where a lawyer is the right answer, the kit says so and tells you what to bring them.
Is it safe to put all this in one place?
That’s exactly why it never asks for passwords. It records where access lives, not the secrets themselves, and the guide has a full page on keeping the kit safe. Follow those three rules and you’ll have a more considered approach than relying on sticky notes and memory alone.
What if I already started planning?
Then start with the Where Things Stand worksheet. Mark what’s already handled, and you’ll see in about ten minutes exactly which two or three things are still missing. Most people are further along than they think in one area and further behind in another. What you’re really adding is a system: one place that ties every part of the plan together, so the right people have the right access at the right time.
Can I share it with my family?
The kit is licensed for your own household. What you’re meant to share is the finished result: tell the person who’d step in that it exists and where it lives. That conversation is part of the kit.
What exactly is this, and what isn’t it?
The Before Kit is an organizing system, not professional advice. It isn’t a will, an advance directive, or legal, financial, tax, or medical guidance, and filling it in doesn’t replace any of those. Where something needs a lawyer, an accountant, or your care team, the kit says so plainly and tells you what to bring them. What it is: a considered structure, built by an educator who spent years working out how adults actually learn complicated things without drowning in them. Every sheet is sequenced, worded, and paced so that a task most people put off for decades becomes something you can do twenty minutes at a time, in any order, without needing anyone’s permission to start.
From Trish
You’ve spent your whole life taking care of the ones you love. This is one more way to do it.
Every sheet you fill in is a decision someone you love won’t have to make in the dark, on the hardest week of their life. You don’t have to finish it today. You just have to start.
Get The Before Kit, $49 USDLeave clarity, not chaos. And a little of yourself, lovingly edited.