Nine. That's how many of my father's online accounts were still logged in and active three years after he died, sitting untouched on devices nobody had thought to check. I found the number by accident, while finally writing the one document our estate planning never covered: a letter of instruction for the executor, the plain-language map that tells whoever's left behind where the digital accounts live and what to actually do about each one. A will handles the legal handoff and stops there. Everything after that, the actual executor tips nobody puts in a legal form, you end up writing yourself, usually with whatever online software you already trust and a running list of half-answered questions you keep adding to.
A Letter of Instruction Is Not a Will
A will is the document that says who gets the house and who raises the kids, and here in Indiana that means two witnesses signing alongside you, no notary required, and no handwritten version scribbled on the back of an envelope, since the state doesn't recognize those. A letter of instruction sits next to all of that without needing any of the same formality. Nobody checks whether you had witnesses when you wrote down which drawer holds the safe deposit box key. It's close in spirit to what I've written before about the difference between a will and a living trust, except this document skips the self-proving clause and the witness requirement altogether, since none of it is legally binding to begin with. Think of it as the metadata a will never bothers with: not what you own, but how to actually run the parts of your life that don't fit neatly into a legal clause.
Why I Didn't Just Call the Accountant
My first move after dad died was calling the accountant who'd done his taxes for as long as I could remember, assuming he'd simply take over from there. He'd retired that spring. No forwarding number, no junior partner picking up his old files, nothing waiting for me but a disconnected line. That's how an entire tax season landed on my kitchen table instead of his office, right when I had the least bandwidth in my life to learn something new. It's also part of why the letter of instruction matters as much as it does. If the one person who's supposed to know things can vanish without warning, somebody still has to be able to find the paperwork without him.
Ten Weeks at the Kitchen Table
By week ten of building this file, most evenings looked about the same: a running list on one side, a browser full of half-remembered logins on the other. The moment that actually moved things forward wasn't dramatic. I was digging through an old email account looking for anything insurance-related, and there it was, the homeowners declarations page from three years back, still sitting in an inbox nobody had thought to search. I sat with that tab open a long minute before I finally closed out of the insurer's site, relieved to have an actual page to point to instead of a guess about what the policy even covered.
Myrna, my neighbor two doors down and a retired fourth-grade teacher, is the kind of person who's kept every utility bill since 1987. I used to think that was excessive. Ten weeks into this project, I'd started keeping paperwork exactly like she does.
Recording My Voice, Not Just My Instructions
Text is what I trust most days. It's the whole job. But text is bad at tone. After I'd typed out my own letter of instruction, I recorded a short video on my phone instead of calling the document finished. No script, just walking through the house pointing out where the water shutoff is and why my brother should keep the record player instead of selling it at a garage sale.
A woman named Deanna Frick asked me about this after a talk I gave one evening at the Carmel Clay Public Library on documents nobody wants to write. She'd turned thirty-eight, bought her first house the year before, and realized somewhere around her birthday that she had no will, nobody named to make decisions if she couldn't, and no clear idea where her own insurance paperwork even was. She showed up to that talk with a binder already color-coded by category, tabs sorted by hue, more organized than most people manage in a decade of trying, and she still said the recorded version felt different from anything she'd typed. Hearing an actual voice explain a decision carries context a form field can't hold.
Digital Accounts and the Rest of the Paperwork
Digital life doesn't leave much of a paper trail unless somebody builds one. The law about who's allowed to log into a dead person's accounts is still catching up to how much of ours actually lives online, which is exactly why this letter ends up mattering more than people expect. Mine turned into the index for everything else in the file, too. I noted where the durable power of attorney paperwork sits for whenever mom needs someone to act on her behalf, which folder holds the transfer-on-death deed on the rental unit, and where I filed the beneficiary worksheet I filled out line by line the first time I wrote my own will, staring at a blinking cursor until I was sure every name was spelled the way it appears on paperwork, not just the way I say it out loud. I flagged the small estate affidavit language I've never had to use but wanted findable anyway, and the revocable living trust paperwork my brother set up when he went a different direction than I did. Somewhere in that same file sits the living will too, the one document about medical decisions instead of money, kept separate so it doesn't get buried under everything else. The letter also points toward the folder for filing your final tax return for a deceased parent online, since tax season landed on me with no warning the spring the accountant retired, and toward the creating a personal property memorandum for heirlooms so nobody has to guess who gets the china.
Write the Letter Before You Need It
None of this required a law degree or even a full weekend, just time spread out over weeks and a willingness to write down things that felt too small to matter. If there's one part of this worth repeating, it's that a letter of instruction only works if somebody besides you knows it exists. Mine sits printed in mom's file and saved on a shared drive with my brother, not because either format is fancier than the other, but because redundancy is the whole point. He won't have to guess which key fits which lock or dig through old email looking for an insurance page nobody flagged. He'll have a map, a set of passwords, and, thanks to that video, my own voice walking him through the parts a form field never could.