Funeral Planning Checklist: What to do when someone you love has passed

Funeral Planning

Introduction

I'm sorry for your loss. I know this is a difficult time, but there are some decisions that need to be made soon regarding funeral arrangements. This is often incredibly overwhelming, and it's easy to become confused and paralysed in the face of it all. But don't worry: by getting organized and taking care of the little things, you can help make this process go smoothly. To help you through this process, below is a checklist outlining what needs to be done right away.

Calling the doctor

When you call the doctor, you will likely receive several pieces of information. First, he or she will advise you on what to do next. If your loved one died at home, for example, the doctor may tell you that it's best to call the police immediately and then a funeral director. If there were other people present when your loved one died and they've already called the police and/or a funeral home (or if they are willing to help with these calls), then it's up to them whether or not they want any additional assistance from their physician or an attorney.

Telling your loved ones

There are certain people you should tell first and others you should tell last. It's best to start with those who will be most deeply affected by this death, such as parents and siblings, then work your way out from there. Once they've been informed, consider telling other family members or close friends directly before posting on social media. Be careful of what you say in emails and text messages; if possible, speak directly with the person in question.

If a friend or family member is upset by hearing of the passing over the phone, offer comfort by letting them know that everything will be okay—that this was not an accident but rather part of God's plan for their life (and the deceased's). You can also give advice about practical matters like whether it's better to donate clothing to charity organizations versus discarding of them so that all proceeds go toward helping other people in need.

Calling the lawyer

Calling the funeral director

The funeral director is the person you will work with to plan and coordinate the funeral service. He or she will help you through the process of choosing an appropriate casket, directing you to a cemetery for burial, and organizing flowers and music for the service. It’s important that you choose someone who has experience helping families in your situation. A good funeral director will also be sensitive to your feelings and needs during this difficult time.

Preparing for the burial or cremation

Preparing for a viewing.

If you choose to have a viewing, decide whether or not to open the casket. If you do opt for open, consider whether it should be closed during some parts of the viewing so that attendees can pay their respects without having to view your loved one's remains.

If a wake is planned, make sure that the location has enough space for all guests and will allow them sufficient time with family members before and after services begin. Make sure that any food/drink provided at this event meets high standards of quality; people may be coming from far away, so make sure there are no surprises in terms of what people will eat or drink!

Prepare your funeral in advance.

Arranging a funeral is a big job, and it's important to be prepared for it. Here are some things you can do:

Conclusion

We hope this checklist helps you navigate your funeral planning process. We know it can seem overwhelming, but it’s important to go through these steps and make sure everything is taken care of so that you don’t have to worry about the details too much. It’s a stressful, sad time for everyone involved, so remember that there are people here to help you. Don’t be afraid to reach out for support when you need it most!

How OneWill beats a traditional Will Lawyer and makes Digital Estate Planning simple

At OneWill, we’ve focused on the needs of normal people making Wills and Estate Planning in the 21st Century.

Web2.0 and the dawn of social media sent ripples through society and every aspect of our lives. What may not be obvious is these digital technologies – and the volume of our lives that we pour into them – has impacts on our future Estates.

Digital Estate Planning is the process of planning for the management and distribution of your Digital Assets prior to your death. Your Digital Estate includes everything of value you own that exists in digital form, for example cryptocurrency, social media accounts, digital wallets, and any kind of content stored online. Unfortunately, you can’t just rock up to any Estate Planning Attorney’s office and expect them to have the knowledge and expertise to handle your Digital Estate Planning properly. It’s an emerging field that deals with emerging technologies, and one that rapidly changes, sometimes on an hourly basis. Your average lawyer doesn’t have the time or resources to stay constantly up to date with it all.

That’s where OneWill comes in. Not only are we Digital Estate Planning experts, we’ve developed simple steps and walkthroughs in our web or mobile application to make Digital Estate Planning easy.

Traditional Estate Planning and Digital Assets

For centuries, if you wanted to draft a Will or develop an Estate Plan, you would make an appointment with a lawyer who would take your instructions in person. The lawyer records everything on paper, it’s signed with a pen, and filed in a secure filing cabinet or safe.

When dealing with “real” and tangible assets, this approach works and has done so for a long time. Where it breaks down is in the virtual world of Digital Assets.

It’s never been a good idea to store secure encryption keys, 2FA backup codes, or digital wallet addresses on paper. Instead of hard copy photos in a photo album, we have virtual mountains of high-resolution images stored in digital form. We don’t keep diaries or journals; we post to social media instead. And most of our monetary wealth never exists in physical form.

Digital Estate Planning and the OneWill solution

The OneWill solution has been designed to meet the unique challenges of Estate Planning in the digital age. Our web or mobile app gives you the ability to protect and store your digital assets, including being able to list digital credentials, logins, backup codes, and more. And end-to-end encryption ensures it is safe and secure 24 hours a day.

Digital Estate Planning is a rapidly evolving area and requires effort to stay up-to-date with developments. This is OneWill’s bread and butter; our solution is made for Digital Estate Planning from the ground up and is designed to change and grow along with your Digital Estate Planning needs.

Stay up to date with Digital Estate Planning

The OneWill app represents our singular focus on creating the best Digital Estate Planning solution in the world. We’re an Australian company but we have global dreams, so if you want to keep up with all the changes along with us, subscribe to our blog and follow us on social media for all the news you need.

The Case for Online Wills

Do you have a valid Will? A recent investigation found that over 50% of Australians don’t. If you’re in this camp, you’re running the risk of dying “intestate” and leaving your Estate to be handled by the Courts – which doesn’t often pan out to anyone’s satisfaction.

In this post, we will explain why an Online Will might be a good solution to this problem.

Online Wills

Does everyone need a Will?

A Will is a legal document that outlines how you want your assets distributed after you die. As the saying goes, you can’t take it with you when you go. But it needs to go somewhere, and McCrindle estimates that over $3.5 trillion will pass along via inheritance in Australia over the next 20 years. If you die without a valid Will, your Estate will be distributed by the Court according to a pre-existing outline – and this outline rarely falls in line with what you may have wanted.

Your Will is the sole authority on what to do with your assets after you pass away and is a remarkably powerful legal document. But there are four minimum requirements a Will must meet to be considered valid, and a lot of other guidelines to follow  depending on the state where your assets are held. If your Will does not meet these requirements, the Court may decide your Will is invalid and may treat your Estate as if you had no Will at all.

Not only is it important to have a Will – even if you don’t own a lot of stuff – it’s also important that it meets the legal requirements for validity.

Do I need a lawyer to draft a Will?

Having your Will drafted by a lawyer is a foolproof way to get a legally valid Will. Going to a competent Estate Planning lawyer, especially if you have a lot of different kinds of assets, will cover your legacy and save your loved ones a lot of stress and money when your time here is over.

But it’s no secret that lawyers can be expensive. You can expect to pay a few hundred dollars even for a straightforward Will and heading into the thousands for complicated Estates. What’s more, your lawyer will charge you every time you need to make updates, adding hundreds more to the lifetime bill.

Can I use a kit?

Will kits provide a simple solution for you to draft a Will yourself. A Will kit is designed to be easy to follow and offers a pre-defined template for you to fill in the blanks. This simplicity comes, however, at the expense of limited scope. Your standard Will kit only covers the most common scenarios and may not be enough to accommodate all your wishes.

What is an Online Will, and how is it different to a Will Kit?

An Online Will is like a Will kit in that it’s a DIY solution to drafting a valid Will. However, unlike a Will kit, an Online Will isn’t limited in scope and can accommodate any kind of scenario needed. An Online Will also walks you through the steps but using web and mobile app technology makes it more user-friendly while being infinitely more flexible.

Are Will kits and Online Wills valid?

As said above, Will kits have very limited options. If you attempt to “hack” the Kit by altering the printed text or bending the rules with ambiguous wording, it can cause lengthy delays in Probate or even render your Will invalid entirely.

Online Wills offer much better flexibility and use a mix of thorough walkthroughs and validation technology to ensure the result is a valid Will.

How much does an Online Will cost?

Online Wills cost a fraction of a lawyer-drafted Will and offer the same scope and protection. What’s more, it costs you nothing to update your Will as many times as you need, and this is where the real savings come in.

Consider the life changes that also require changes to your Will – buying or selling property, marriage or divorce, children being born, friends or family members coming and going – if you had to pay a lawyer to make these changes every time, you’d be looking at thousands of dollars over the course of your life. An Online Will can be updated at any time at zero cost.

Where should I store my Will?

Your Will is a physical document and needs to be stored securely. Damage or evidence of tampering can render a Will invalid, so you need to keep it somewhere it can remain untouched.

You can store your Will at a bank or secure storage facility, in a safety deposit box, or in a safe at your home.

With Online Wills, you may also get online or mobile access to your documents. OneWill Online Wills offer this – you can access your Will and other Estate Planning documents anywhere, anytime, as long as you have mobile data.

What maintenance does my Will require?

Your Will needs to be up-to-date with your current address and correct description of assets at the time of your death. This is why it’s so important to update your Will after any kind of life change or change in assets.

Will kits, like lawyer-drafted Wills, can’t be quickly and easily updated. You can’t cross out an old address, make notes or comments in the margins, or add or remove a beneficiary from a Will kit. If you need to make changes you need to buy a new Will kit and start all over again.

With Online Wills, you generally get the ability to make changes and updates to your Will and generate a new Will instantaneously and zero cost. Again, this is where an Online Will is superior to both lawyer-drafted Wills and Will kits.

What about Probate?

If you have a complicated Estate or you are a high net-worth individual, you should consider appointing an Estate Planning Attorney to draft your Will. A competent Estate Planning Attorney will have the expertise to properly cover your entire Estate, and you can expect the Will they draft to pass Probate with minimal fuss.

Will kits and Online Wills are just as legally valid as lawyer-drafted Wills, but there are important things to consider. There are unfortunate examples of Will kits with ambiguous wording causing significant delays and legal costs for loved ones along with the resulting stress. The safest way to avoid this would be for a lawyer to review your Will kit draft – at which point, once the bill comes through, you may as well have paid them to draft it themselves.

OneWill, as an Online Will provider, provides Probate-compliant Wills. OneWill Online Wills offer options for a significant number of scenarios in which it can generate a Will that will make it through Probate. If the app can’t accommodate a particular scenario, the option won’t exist in the selections. This can be an easy litmus test to see whether you need to go to an Estate Planning Attorney.

OneWill Online Wills – the 21st Century option

The average Australian is far better off with an Online Will over a Will kit. If you don’t have an expansive asset portfolio, intertwining business interests, or complicated trust setups, an OneWill Online Will is the place you should start. OneWill Online Wills cost a lot less than a lawyer and offer a much broader range of options to properly protect your legacy for your loved ones.

Get started with your OneWill Online Will and enjoy the peace of mind that follows!

The 3 Vital Steps to Building a Digital Estate Plan

Everyone should have a Will, even if they think they don’t have many assets. If you’re reading this and you don’t have a Will yet, check out our posts on the 4 Fundamental Steps to Drafting a Legally Binding Will and the Other Things to Consider when Drafting a Will.

But of increasing importance in this digital age is the need for a Digital Estate Plan – a plan for the collection and distribution of our Digital Assets.

What Are Digital Assets?

Digital Assets are things you own that have value but that only exist in digital form.

There are two main categories of Digital Assets:

  1. Data such as documents, images, audio, video or other similar properties, stored digitally on a device such as a computer, laptop, tablet, mobile device, or server; and
  2. Digital Profiles such as email accounts, social media accounts, online shopping accounts, forum profiles, or any other online account containing personal information. Of note is that you can derive value from what the account gives you access to (for example, online financial accounts).

The “Data” category is fairly easy to understand, because even though a thing may only exist as a series of zeroes and ones on a hard drive, it is still a “thing” and recognisable as a discreet unit.

The “Digital Profiles” category gets a little trickier and has much broader scope. Examples of Digital Profiles can include:

What happens If you don't have a Digital Estate Plan?

If you pass away without a Digital Estate Plan in place, it can cause problems for those you leave to handle and distribute your Estate.

Digital laws are not tightly controlled, and legislation doesn’t exist to cover every aspect of digital life. In some cases, the only applicable laws are the terms and conditions published on a provider’s website, which the provider can change at whim. A great example comes from Facebook. Have you ever received a notification of a “Friendversary” or the birthday of a person you know to be deceased? One Oxford study calculated that there could be up to 5 billion deceased members by 2100.

All of these users will have things of value – their photos, videos, and written words – stored on Facebook’s servers. These things belong to their Estate and should be distributed to their beneficiaries. But without a Digital Estate Plan in place, they may stay floating in the Cloud forever.

It’s particularly important for anyone with financial assets stored digitally, particularly any cryptocurrency. If you don’t have a Digital Estate Plan in place along with stored credentials for access, your loved ones could lose access to the money and it will be gone forever.

The 3 Vital Steps to building a Digital Estate Plan

1. Make a List

This is probably the most arduous part – making a complete list of all your Digital Assets.

Look at the examples above and think about the two categories. Do you have assets in these categories? Some you can think of straight away – your Facebook profile, your Gmail account, your Dropbox storage – but others may not be as obvious.

Along with what the asset is, write down the access information associated with it such as email addresses, usernames, passwords, and 2FA backup codes.

You’ll need to keep this updated whenever you sign up to a new service, and in reality you will probably need a few goes at completing it as you remember things later. So keep it somewhere you won’t lose it!

2. Who and What?

 pivotal role in your Digital Estate Plan is your Digital Executor. This person, like your normal Executor in your Will, will be responsible for carrying out your wishes as outlined in the Plan.

Next, you need to think about what you want done with each of your Digital Assets. For example, do you want your Facebook account to be memorialised? Do you want your LinkedIn profile to be removed? Make sure you clearly note this in your Digital Estate Plan.

There are other less obvious decisions to make. For example, do you want to immediately close your eCommerce store, or do you want all the stock sold off first?

It’s important to go through the whole list and make a choice about every item – who gets it, and/or what gets done with it.

3. Store and Update!

Your Digital Estate Plan will contain sensitive information that could cause a lot of damage in the wrong hands. Store it securely, and make sure your Digital Executor will have access when the time comes.

You should make mention of your Digital Estate Plan in your Will, but you shouldn’t make it part of your Will. This is because the Plan will need to be updated regularly as you gain some assets, drop some others, or change your passwords on a regular basis (like we all should). Changing your Will every time you change your Netflix password will become a real hassle.

Digital Estate Plans for Business Owners

If you own a business that has an online presence – and let’s face it, what business doesn’t these days – you should create a separate Digital Estate Plan specifically for the business. Because of the additional regulations around business ownership and succession planning, it’s recommended to keep it separate from your personal Digital Estate Plan. This way, your business may be able to carry on without you and without confusion, debate, and legal challenges.

Feeling a bit overwhelmed? It’s not surprising! OneWill has developed a solution for Digital Estate Planning that makes it a lot easier. Check it out here.

Kim Kardashian's 40th Hologram gift from Kane West

Kanye West has gifted Kim Kardashian a hologram of her father, Robert Kardashian Sr.,  for her 40th Birthday and it will blow you away.

TMZ reports that Kanye surprised Kim, Kris, Khloe, Kourtney and Rob by taking them into a dark room and unveiled the surprise hologram. As a holograms Robert speaks for about 4 minutes wishing her a happy birthday and telling her how proud he is of her.

Robert Kardashian was an American attorney and businessman who gained international recognition as OJ Simpson's defense attorney during his 1995 Murder Trial. He was also fathered Kim, Kourtney, Khloe, and Rob Kardashian with Kris Jenner.

This will definitely be a birthday present that Kim and her family will not forget; good job Kanye!

Hologram in Estate Planning?

This technology is relatively new however it has come a long way from when it was first used in 2012 for Tupac's performance at Coachella.

Unfortunately however the current technology, at the current time, is still a gift for the rich.

But in the future how would you like to give a similar gift to a loved one after you are gone? Maybe even giving a speech at your own funeral recounting your life story as you grow through out the performance.

Checkout what else OneWill can offer today.