How to prepare for an estate-planning appointment
The first part of any appointment is spent on facts you could have written down at your kitchen table for nothing. Here is what to bring, and why our checklist explains every task it adds.
The appointment is the expensive part
Whoever you eventually sit down with — a lawyer, a notary, a licensed adviser, depending on where you are — will spend the first part of the meeting asking you things you could have written down at the kitchen table for nothing. What you own. What you owe. Who is in your life. Where the papers are. What you would like to happen. None of that requires a professional; all of it saves professional time.
So the useful preparation is not deciding what your will should say. It is arriving with the facts already assembled and the open questions already written down.
Four things worth having before you go
1. A list of what exists
Accounts, property, policies, a business share, anything owed. Approximate values are fine; blanks are fine too, as long as they are marked as unknown rather than filled in with a guess. A figure you invented is worse than a gap, because a gap gets asked about.
2. Where the documents live
Not the documents themselves — just where each one is, and who else knows. The most common failure in this whole area is not a badly drafted will; it is a perfectly good one that nobody could find.
3. The people, described in your own words
Names, and how you would describe each person if you were talking about them. Do not try to work out who is legally entitled to what — that is the question you are paying someone to answer, and in many countries the answer is partly fixed by law regardless of what anyone writes.
4. The questions you cannot answer
Every one of them. “Does the pension go by the will or by the form I filled in at work?” is worth more at an appointment than an hour of general conversation.
Why our checklist explains itself
A checklist that just appears is a checklist you cannot argue with. Ours puts the trigger next to every task it added: Why this appears: you said you want to discuss children or other dependents. If the reason is wrong, change the answer. If the task does not apply, mark it not applicable and it comes out of the count entirely rather than sitting there as a permanent failure.
“Not sure” is treated as its own answer rather than as a no. It produces a task to decide whether the subject applies to you, because the things that get missed are almost never the things people decided against — they are the things nobody ever settled.
What the count means
It says “6 of 14 selected preparation tasks marked done”, and every word of that is doing work. Selected, because you chose which apply. Marked, because you marked them; nothing was verified. And it is a count of preparation, not a percentage of protection — there is no number that can tell you your affairs are in order, and a tool that showed you one would be lying.
A note on doing this in more than one country
If you live in one country and own something in another, or you have moved and never revisited arrangements made somewhere else, that is worth raising explicitly and early. More than one country’s law can be relevant at once, they can reach different answers, and which one governs is a genuinely technical question. Our checklist adds a task for it and takes it no further, because taking it further would mean guessing.
Where the general points here come from
These sources support the narrow distinctions below and nothing further. None of them is a statement about your situation, and none of them makes this page legal advice.
- Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — Planning for diminished capacity and illness
Supports: That organising documents in advance, and telling trusted people where they are, is standard preparation; and that a trusted contact is a point of contact rather than authority to transact.
Scope: Written for a United States audience. The organising advice generalises; anything about specific US account types does not.
Checked: 5 September 2026 - American Bar Association — Estate Planning Information & FAQs
Supports: The general vocabulary of estate planning, and that a healthcare directive addresses a different question from a will.
Scope: US-oriented, and state law varies within it. Used here only for terminology.
Checked: 5 September 2026
One place we deliberately differ from the CFPB page: it suggests keeping a list of online passwords and PINs with your papers. Our tools will not hold those, ask for them, or provide a field for them. Where you keep such a list is your decision; it is not going in a browser tool.