What a Will Cannot Carry

An estate plan is very good at moving two things: assets, and authority. It is not built to carry anything else, and the things it cannot carry are usually what the family ends up wishing they had.

The questions that come after

Sit with families after a death for a while and you notice they mostly ask questions the documents cannot answer.

Why did they split it this way? Did they mean for us to sell the land, or keep it? Was the difference between what my brother got and what I got about something, or was it just how the numbers landed?

A will answers who receives what. It does not say why, and the why is what determines whether the people you leave behind read a decision as fair or as a message.

A letter of wishes

The ordinary tool for this is a letter of wishes. It is a plain document you write yourself, kept alongside your plan, addressed to the people who will be handling things and the people who will be receiving things.

Here is what it is not. It is not legally binding. It does not override your will or your trust, and it should not try to. If it contradicts them you have not added context, you have created an argument.

Inside those limits it can carry quite a lot.

• Why the plan is shaped the way it is, particularly where shares are unequal or someone is left out.
• What you hope happens with a specific thing: the house, the land, a business, the ring nobody has discussed. Say what you hope, and understand what that is worth. Some states let you keep a separate list of who gets which item and update it whenever you like, and the list still controls. Alabama is not one of them. Here, a writing only carries legal force if it already existed when the will was signed and the will points to it clearly enough to identify it. A letter written or revised afterwards explains; it does not direct. If you want a particular item to actually reach a particular person, that belongs in the will or the trust.
• What you would want your trustee to weigh when they are exercising discretion. Trustees are frequently given judgment and almost never given guidance about how to use it.
• Where things are, and who to call. Advisors, accountants, the insurance agent, the neighbor with a key.
• The practical knowledge that lives only in your head: which contractor to use, when the taxes are due on the place in the country, which account pays the utilities.
• Anything you would want said to a person that you would rather say now than have them guess at later.

Write it in your own words. It does not need legal language and is better without it.

Keep it consistent, and keep it current

Two rules make a letter of wishes helpful rather than harmful.

It has to agree with the legal documents. If you decide to change who gets what, change the documents, not just the letter.

And it should be dated and revisited. A letter written when your children were small, referring to people who have since died and property you have since sold, can confuse the situation it was meant to clarify.

Recording your voice

Some people would rather speak than write, and a recording carries something a document does not. Anyone can do this on a phone. Say who you are and when you are recording, say what you want to say, and keep it somewhere your family will actually find, which usually means telling a specific person where it is.

Digital files are easy to lose in exactly the circumstances where they matter, so treat the location as part of the plan rather than an afterthought.

Two cautions worth having before you press record. A recording is not a will in Alabama, which requires a signed document witnessed by two people, so anything you say about who gets what has no legal effect on its own. And if your estate is ever contested, the recording is evidence and it will be played. That can help you: someone calm and clear on camera is hard to argue was being manipulated. It can also hurt, if the day you recorded happened to be a bad one, or you were tired or on medication or lost a name. Record when you are at your best, and if there is any real prospect of a fight over your estate, talk to us before recording rather than after.

Where this fits with the legal work

Documents and this are different jobs. The documents keep your family out of court and make sure the right people have authority at the right moment. This is about making sure the people who inherit understand what they inherited and why.

We raise it during planning because the design of a plan is exactly when the reasons are clearest in your mind, and because writing down why you are doing something occasionally changes what you decide to do. Our legacy planning page has more on how that conversation fits into the work.

The letter itself is yours to write. That is not us handing you homework; it is the part that only works if it is genuinely in your voice.