Emails and your Estate
What do emails have to do with your Estate? Well two things, broadly speaking. Firstly, your Executor probably needs to be able to get into your email because honestly, half of your life is probably in there. I will deal with that in another post though.
The second thing emails have to do with your Estate, which I will deal with here in this blog post, is this - as part of an Estate Plan that provides properly for your children I want you to set up an email account for your child.
What do you want your child to know?
That they are loved by you, no doubt.
Have you ever thought about the core reason why families share stories from their joint past? We certainly don’t do it out of obligation, we naturally share and re-share stories, sometimes silly stories, of things that we remember.
Now I am not a historian or an anthropologist so I am not going to attempt to answer that question, instead I want you to think about how often you share stories with your loved ones and how that makes you feel. Whether you live to see your children have their own children, or not, you probably want your children to have access to stories about your time with them while they were young.
Take more selfies (yes I said it)
I want you to create an email account for your child and then I want you to take more selfies, but with a purpose. Here is a photo of you and I reading your favourite book. Here is a photo of you and I at bed time with your favourite blanket. They don’t all have to be selfies, here is a photo of you and your favourite toy.
Take these photos and then send an email to your child telling them about the photo, why you felt it was significant, and what it means to both of you. You don’t have to do this every day or every week, and the email itself doesn’t have to be that long. But whenever you look at something and think oh my child loves that toy/book/sippy cup/snack/t-shirt then you should take a photo of that and send a quick email.
This will get hard as they get older, when they are teenagers, and yet it becomes more important.
You could also (with the permission of the other parent) take a photo of them on a play date with their friend, tell them their friend’s name, how they know them, and what they like to do with that friend. I bet you have photos floating through the family photo album of random friends who you partially remember? Give them a name and a background.
Why?
I am really trying to structure your Estate Planning so that it is valuable to you during your life, as well as being valuable if you should die unexpectedly.
The first reason this is important is because when your child is an adult they will love these photos and short stories. This is a really easy and simple way for you to catalogue some photos and quick thoughts about them as they grow and age and change. We all have plans to do these lovely and time consuming books or videos or whatever, but this is a very bite sized piece of life admin that you can take care of quickly, using one hand and a phone.
It can also be retrospective, if your child is older then every time you get one of those prompts from this day three, five or ten years ago you can grab a photo of your child, email it to them, tell them how old the photo is and what it makes you think of.
The second reason I want you to do this is that they will, one day, need a professional email account, so set it up now in their actual name.
Thirdly, if something were to happen to you unexpectedly this email account will be really useful to those who are caring for your children, whether that is their remaining parent or a guardian. This information about their favourite toy or their regular play date will be so helpful both to help the parent or guardian to care for the child, and to help them find things (what is a binky and why does she keep asking for it?), as well as giving them a place to go when they want to talk about you.
Stories are important
Whether you are still alive or not, the stories about you and your children, your family and it’s development are important. Stories like this are also more difficult to reconstruct later. As with most things it is easiest to keep a record as things are happening.
Now don’t get me wrong I am not telling you to photograph and document everything, as I said earlier I am not even telling you to send them a weekly email. What I am saying is to email them about the things that seem significant to them. This is a relatively quick thing to do once you have set up the email account and you get into the habit, you can do it from your phone at night.
Set it up in their full name, then that name is saved for them for later as an email account, and it is easier for someone who is trying to find the email account for them. Set a proper password and then send that password to the child’s other parent and to the child’s guardian. These stories aren’t just important if your child is living with their guardian, they are also important if they lose just one parent. Make sure that you set up the recovery email address properly too in case you forget the password. Now you will need to lie about your child’s age in order to set up the email account, but I think you can cope with that deception.
Please please please - give it a proper password
If you give it a weak password and the account is hacked, then someone has access to probably every piece of information necessary to perform identity theft on your child. Please give it a proper password, I have a separate blog to help you with that.
Proper Estate Planning is overwhelming
I know that proper Estate Planning is overwhelming, it involves a lot of big and sometimes difficult decisions, and it involves a lot of life admin that you had successfully put off until you came to see me. Then I start harassing you to make all these big decisions, and to take care of all these tasks, and it all seems too much, right?
This is why I have been working on a system to try and help step you through it, and to let you do it at your own pace. If you want to read more about my book you can do that here.
I need to get started
If you are ready to get started on your Estate Plan then you have two options, the first one is to jump into my free Facebook group. The second option is to give me a call, 0421 887 571, and I will let you know how I can help.
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