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Legacy & Estate Planning Downloads
Everything on this page is free, printable, and yours to keep. These worksheets, checklists, and workbooks cover executor responsibilities, estate planning essentials, special needs trusts, life insurance decisions, digital asset management, and legacy building. Each resource was designed to bring clarity to decisions that feel overwhelming, whether you’re settling an estate, planning your own, or helping a family member navigate theirs. Download what you need. Print what helps. Share with anyone who could use it.
Distribution & Usage Rights
Every resource on this page is free to use, print, share, and redistribute. Therapists, counselors, hospice workers, funeral directors, attorneys, financial planners, and faith leaders are welcome to print copies for clients, include them in packets, or distribute at workshops. Websites and organizations may host, embed, or republish these documents. Friends and family can photocopy and share freely. The only thing we ask is that Memorial Merits branding and links remain intact. No fees. No permission needed. No login required. Ever. These resources are educational tools, not legal, financial, or medical advice. Always consult a qualified professional for decisions specific to your situation.
Executor Resources
These worksheets, checklists, and workbooks cover every stage of serving as an executor, from deciding whether to accept the role through closing the estate. Each resource is designed to prevent costly mistakes and protect you from personal liability during a process most people have never done before.
The Executor’s First 30 Days: A Professional Timeline
A day-by-day visual timeline of everything a newly appointed executor needs to do in the first 30 days. Covers securing property, locating documents, filing with probate court, notifying creditors, beginning asset inventory, transferring financial accounts, and starting tax preparation. Designed as a presentation-style guide you can reference throughout the process.
Executor Master Checklist: 25-Step Progress Tracker
The complete executor workflow in one trackable checklist. Twenty-five sequential steps from accepting the role through closing the estate, with checkboxes to mark progress. Use this as your master roadmap so nothing gets missed during a process that typically runs 12 to 24 months.
Executor Attorney Decision Worksheet
Not every estate needs an attorney, but making the wrong call can cost thousands. This worksheet walks you through the factors that determine whether your situation requires professional legal help: estate complexity, family dynamics, out-of-state property, tax obligations, and contested claims. Answer the questions and the decision becomes clear.
Executor Error Prevention Checklist
Some executor mistakes can be fixed. Others create permanent personal liability. This workbook covers the errors that cannot be undone: premature distribution, missed tax deadlines, unauthorized asset sales, property destruction before inventory, and self-dealing. Includes a distribution safety checklist, tax deadline calendar, asset sale decision tree, and self-dealing prohibition guide.
Digital Executor Asset Inventory Workbook
A complete inventory template covering every category of assets an executor needs to document: real property, bank accounts, investments, vehicles, jewelry, collections, digital assets, life insurance, business interests, and personal property. Fill this out before disposing of, donating, or distributing anything. A thorough inventory protects you from liability claims later.
Executor Liability Protection Workbook
Executors are personally liable for breaches of fiduciary duty, and most people have no idea how easy it is to cross the line. This workbook explains what fiduciary duty actually means in practice, identifies the most common liability triggers, and provides documentation frameworks that protect you if a beneficiary or creditor challenges your decisions.
Executor Compensation Calculator Worksheet
Executors are entitled to compensation, but most don’t know how much is reasonable or how to calculate it. This worksheet covers state-by-state compensation norms, percentage-based versus hourly fee structures, how to document your time, and what courts consider reasonable. Use it before setting your fee to avoid disputes with beneficiaries.
Executor Decision Assessment
Being named executor is an honor, but it’s also a serious legal commitment that can last over a year. This assessment helps you evaluate whether you should accept the role based on your relationship to the estate, time availability, geographic proximity, estate complexity, and family dynamics. Better to make an informed decision now than resign mid-process.
Special Needs Planning
Families with disabled dependents face estate planning challenges that standard documents don’t address. These resources cover trust selection, attorney vetting, guardian designation, and coordination strategies that protect benefits eligibility while ensuring long-term care.
Special Needs Attorney Vetting Toolkit
Most estate planning attorneys don’t specialize in special needs law, and hiring the wrong one can disqualify your dependent from government benefits. This toolkit gives you the exact questions to ask, red flags to watch for, and evaluation criteria to determine whether an attorney actually understands supplemental needs trusts, ABLE accounts, and benefits preservation.
Special Needs Trust Planning Workbook
Choosing the wrong trust structure can disqualify a disabled beneficiary from Medicaid and SSI. This workbook walks you through first-party versus third-party trusts, pooled trusts, ABLE accounts, funding strategies, trustee selection, and the letter of intent that tells future caregivers how your loved one wants to live. Designed for families, not attorneys.
Special Needs Estate Planning Workbook
A comprehensive planning workbook that goes beyond trusts to cover the full picture: government benefits inventory, care team documentation, housing plans, financial projections, transition planning, and coordination between family members. Use this alongside the Trust Planning Workbook to build a complete plan that protects your dependent’s quality of life and benefits eligibility.
Guardian Selection Planning Workbook
Choosing a guardian is one of the most important decisions a parent can make, and one of the easiest to put off. This worksheet helps you evaluate potential guardians based on values alignment, financial stability, geographic proximity, willingness, relationship with your child, and backup options. Completing this removes the guesswork for courts if something happens to you.
Estate Planning Essentials
The foundational documents, checklists, and trackers for organizing an estate plan. Whether you’re starting from scratch or settling someone else’s affairs, these resources bring order to the process and make sure nothing critical gets overlooked.
Estate Planning Essentials Checklist
A single-page overview of every document and decision a complete estate plan requires: will, power of attorney, healthcare directive, beneficiary designations, trust considerations, digital accounts, and more. Use this as your starting point to identify what you already have, what’s missing, and what needs updating.
Digital Asset Inventory Worksheet
Your digital life doesn’t disappear when you do. Email accounts, social media, cloud storage, cryptocurrency, subscriptions, domains, and online banking all need to be documented so your executor can access, transfer, or close them. This worksheet provides a structured format for cataloging every digital asset with login details, recovery options, and your wishes for each account.
Family Estate Coordination Workbook
Estate planning falls apart when family members aren’t on the same page. This workbook helps families coordinate responsibilities, document who holds what role, establish communication protocols, and identify potential conflicts before they become legal disputes. Especially useful for families with multiple siblings, blended households, or aging parents with complex needs.
Blended Family Special Needs Estate Planning
Blended families face estate planning challenges that standard templates ignore: stepchildren, ex-spouses, competing inheritance expectations, and children from multiple marriages. Add a disabled dependent to that mix and the complexity multiplies. This workbook addresses the intersection of blended family dynamics and special needs planning, covering trust structures, guardianship considerations, and strategies that protect every member of the family.
Sibling Inheritance Conflict Worksheet
Inheritance disputes destroy more families than the grief itself. This worksheet helps families identify the most common conflict triggers before they escalate: unequal distributions, caretaker resentment, sentimental item disputes, perceived favoritism, and executor disagreements. Work through it together or individually. Either way, naming the tensions before probate begins is the single best way to prevent a legal fight.
Death Certificate Tracker Worksheet
Track every certified copy of the death certificate, where each one was sent, and which institutions still require one. Executors typically need 10 to 15 copies, and losing track of where they’ve gone creates delays with banks, insurers, courts, and government agencies. This single-page worksheet keeps it all organized so nothing slips through the cracks.
Legacy Building
Estate planning handles the legal and financial side. Legacy building handles the human side. These resources help you capture the stories, values, and conversations that documents and bank accounts never will.
Legacy Journal Starter Kit
A guided introduction to legacy journaling with prompts designed to help you capture the stories, lessons, and memories that legal documents never will. Covers your childhood, defining moments, relationships, career, regrets, hopes for future generations, and the values you want to pass down. Start here if the idea of writing your life story feels overwhelming. These prompts break it into pieces anyone can tackle.
100 More Legacy Journal Prompts
Once you’ve worked through the starter kit and want to go deeper, these 100 additional prompts cover territory most people never think to document: your relationship with money, the hardest decisions you’ve made, what you wish you’d said, traditions you hope survive you, and the ordinary moments that shaped who you became. Pair with the starter kit or use independently.
Family Legacy Conversations Guide
Writing a journal is personal. Having the conversation is harder. This guide provides frameworks for initiating the discussions most families avoid: end-of-life wishes, financial transparency, family history, forgiveness, and what you want remembered. Includes conversation starters, tips for navigating resistance, and guidance on when to push and when to let it breathe. Some of the most important things your family will ever hear won’t come from a document. They’ll come from a conversation.
Financial, Military & Special Reports
Specialized resources covering life insurance planning, military pre-deployment readiness, and investigative reports on critical estate planning decisions. These don’t fit neatly into one category but each one addresses a specific need that other resources on this page don’t cover.
Life Insurance Planning Workbook
Most people either skip life insurance or buy the wrong amount. This workbook walks you through calculating your actual coverage need based on income replacement, debt obligations, childcare costs, education funding, and final expenses. Includes a policy comparison framework for evaluating term versus whole life, a beneficiary designation checklist, and a review schedule so your coverage keeps pace with your life.
Military Pre-Deployment Readiness Checklist
Deployment timelines don’t wait for you to get your affairs in order. This checklist covers everything a service member needs to handle before leaving: power of attorney, SGLI beneficiary verification, will updates, family care plans, allotment setup, vehicle and property arrangements, digital account access for your spouse, and emergency contact protocols. Built by a Navy service member who learned the hard way that the military’s standard brief doesn’t cover enough.
7 Critical Actions Special Report
When someone dies or becomes incapacitated and nothing is in order, these are the seven actions that matter most in the first 72 hours. This isn’t a comprehensive planning guide. It’s a triage document for people in crisis who need to know what to do right now, in what order, and why each step can’t wait. Print it. Keep it somewhere accessible. Hope you never need it.
