Before You Go…
The 25 Documents You Need
It was a worst-case scenario: the house was trashed, and so was the estate.
The gentleman who had lived there had been in a physical and mental decline for some time, and when his next of kin tried to put the pieces of the estate together after his passing, there were three floors of junk to dig through, and none of the documents they really needed was there.
You can help your prospects avoid that.
Leave it to The Wall Street Journal, and reporter Saabira Chaudhuri, to come up with a comprehensive list of all the documents required to establish an estate and memorialize end-of-life instructions. The WSJ story refers to them as “The 25 Documents You Need Before You Die,” which sums it up pretty well.
They also call it a “death dossier.” We don’t recommend that.
As fundraising professionals it’s our duty to insure that our prospects have their estate-related ducks in a row ahead of time. And helping prospects accomplish that is a great opportunity to step up and shine as a trusted advisor.
The whole WSJ article is worth reading for the practical advice it gives on the hows and whys of organizing this information, but we’ve called out the document list itself for easy reference.
Download it here.
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