Estate planning is more than just paperwork—it’s about securing a legacy for your loved ones. In this powerful episode, Adam Zuckerman, founder of Buried in Work, shares how the loss of his father motivated him to build a company focused on transforming estate planning into a meaningful process for families. Adam talks about the importance of preparing for the unexpected and how his journey through grief inspired him to help others navigate the emotional and practical aspects of planning for the future. Tune in for an inspiring story of resilience, how to turn loss into purpose, and how estate planning can be a source of strength and connection.

I am sharing my experience of loving the same man for 32 years, a mother to two adult children, a retired military officer, a breast cancer survivor, and my connections with others.

Anyone experiencing suicidal thoughts should reach out to a suicide hotline or local emergency number in their country: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/suicide/suicide-prevention-hotlines-resources-worldwide

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Watch the episode here

 

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Turning Loss Into Legacy: The Power Of Estate Planning With Adam Zuckerman

Adam, welcome to the widowhood.

Tina, thanks for having me.

I’m glad to have you. What do you think about “Welcome to the widowhood?” What do you think when you hear that?

There are a lot of different ways I can think about that, but weirdly, I think about possibility. There are a lot of negative connotations with things in life, and I think we need to do our best to turn that schematic around. There is a comedian who said something to the extent of divorce being a bad thing to most people. It’s not like someone says, “It was amazing. I finished her sentences, she finished mine, I met her parents, we got along great, so we got a divorce.”

It’s a culmination of something, and that something can lead to something that isn’t necessarily better but can be different. When you say “Welcome to widowhood,” I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing. It is a difficult and painful experience for a lot of people, but there can be some very positive aspects that we can find if we look hard enough.

 

 

That’s fair. I would like to add, as you mentioned the statement about somebody getting divorced, that becoming a widow or a widower is a life goal. We take marriage vows and we say, “Till death do us part.” We don’t take marriage vows and say, “Till we get divorced.” When you say those are #RelationshipGoals, this is what it looks like. We don’t often think about what it would be like to be in my position or someone who has lost their wife, but this is what life goals look like.

I love that. That is such a wonderful way to look at it.

It is. In the idea of the inevitable, the reason we’re having this conversation is that the products that you support and you do are about life goals, the idea of wanting to have a plan, care for our loved ones, and leave everyone in a good space. Before we get into this, how did we get here with this, and who is Adam?

Who Is Adam Zuckerman?

I have a strange background. I’m an attorney, I have an MBA. The absolute last thing that I thought I’d be doing, if you spoke to me 5 or 10 years ago, was working in the industry that a lot of people refer to as death tech, which is neat. I have sold clean energy plants to prime ministers around the world. I was the entrepreneur and futurist for Discovery Channel’s parent company.

I was somebody jumping off the top of Mount Everest, how you make the show better, go fix file sharing, or invest in startups. I was at a hedge fund outside of law school when I got my MBA. That grew to $1.2 billion while I was there on the ops team. This is all new for me, but it became very personal after my father passed away from leukemia. If you like, we can get into the story of how that happened.

I would because that is the heartbeat of what you’re doing.

Six and a half or seven years before starting Buried In Work, my father was diagnosed with leukemia for the first time, AML.

Your dad’s name, Adam?

He’s Andy. It’s funny, a lot of people called me Andy growing up. I don’t know, maybe it’s just the way. Maybe I’m an Andy by default. He named me wrong. He was diagnosed with AML. I donated bone marrow to him, so we got him some extra time, which is pretty neat. There’s only a 30% chance that I was a match, and I was.

The procedure went well, and he relapsed once. He was at my house one day, and we were doing some woodworking in the basement. He walks up the stairs and he goes, “Adam, I’m tired.” My dad is not one to complain. He’s one to make a joke. When we say we’re tired, we go and take a nap, we get some tea, we read a book or something like that. When he says, “I’m tired,” it means something is not right. I have to go back to the doctor’s office.

We’re in Maryland. He goes to Hopkins, where his doctor is. These doctors are phenomenal at Johns Hopkins, so shout out to them. They ran some tests. They told him to check in on a Thursday. Twelve days later, he passed away. It was quick. There are some positive narratives. If this happened twenty years ago, we wouldn’t have got those extra six and a half or seven years.

My sister’s kids were younger when he was diagnosed first. That extra time that he got, he was able to build relationships that they’re going to have memories of right now, which is phenomenal. The way things transpired up until the day or two before he passed, we were still having conversations with him. It wasn’t that somebody didn’t wake up, getting hit by the proverbial bus. We had a little bit of closure.

If we had to pick a way that it happened, given the circumstances, it was very beautiful. It set off this chain of events for me that has led to probably the most rewarding professional experience of my life, or definitely among that. That’s the founding of Buried In Work. I didn’t mean to start this company. I was helping my mom transition her estate or transition my dad’s estate to her. I was the executor of the will. I have two sisters, and I wanted to make sure of everything that I was doing.

I had very copious notes of everything, a spreadsheet of at this date, at this time, I did this for this reason, this is the outcome, this is what I have to do next. I had another spreadsheet that does X, Y, and Z. Here’s where I found the information, telling me what I needed to do. When I went with my mom’s financial planner because we’re transitioning accounts, making sure the payable-on-death beneficiary is transferred, etc. At the end of the conversation, she said, “Adam, this is the most thorough transition I’ve ever seen in my life, and you have to give it away to other people.”

I grew up with cartoons. On one shoulder, I had that devil guy that we all probably remember. He’s going, “She’s lying to you. It’s not that good. She just doesn’t want you to move your mom’s money to another broker.” I had power of attorney and I was there. On the other hand, the angel on my shoulder was going, “Adam, it’s organized. It’s a little bit more organized than it needs to be. Maybe she has something there.”

I went and I spoke to a bunch of friends and showed them what I did. I showed some of my mom’s friends what I was doing. Every single person said, “Adam, this is good stuff. Take out your mom’s stuff, and type up some notes. You have time on your hands. Make a webpage. You know how to do that. Help some people out.” That’s what I did.

I built a website, BuriedInWork.com. We started looking for names, and my dad loves puns. We tried to come up with a punny name in his honor a bit. We started looking at Good Grief, but Good Grief was taken. Buried in Work hit because it takes 570 hours on average to transition an estate in America, which is far too long and you get buried in the work, and then “buried” is a pun with the end of life. I made this website and I posted on Nextdoor, if you’re familiar with it. I posted it on LinkedIn and Facebook. In a week, we had over 10,000 visits to the webpage.

Since then, things have grown significantly. People came to us, and I was flooded with messages saying, “Thank you for doing this. This is helpful. I wish I had this when my mom passed away. Instead of telling us tips on how to do stuff, can you help us do it?” We came out with products. The products, the checklists, the guides, and the directories we have are making an impact. There was one woman whose husband was in the hospital. He wasn’t paying bills because he was in the hospital.

She went through one of our checklists that said you have to make sure that you have an updated understanding of where all your policies are in terms of what’s important to need to be paid. It turns out that the life insurance policy on the husband hadn’t been paid and was going to lapse in two days. She called, she got an extension, and they sent a check, and they paid. He died a week or two later, and she got a $403,000 check that she would have missed out on.

That is a game changer.

That’s life-changing. It would have gone away had it not for following the directions of this checklist. We have stories like that, and that’s how things started. This is what I’m doing full-time. It’s not just me. There are a lot of people who are involved. I like to wake up every morning and look at the dashboard of where people are logging in from. At any given time, we have a bunch of people on the website.

Adam, thank you for sharing that. I am sorry for your dad’s passing, but it sounds as if your dad had a wonderful life. When you think of your dad, what are some great memories about him?

Great Memories With Andrew

He is a funny guy. He would wake up early to go to work so he could come back and see the family. He worked at the IRS. He was an executive there, the director of federal, state, and local governments. He’d be like, “Go to Michigan” or “Audit Michigan.” Our bird’s name was Erisa. If you’re familiar with that, it’s the law for pension plans.

He had a funny sense of humor. He cared about making other people’s lives better. That’s it. Whether it was your family or people he cared about. He could always find joy in the moment. There’s a game that we ended up creating for Buried In Work called One More Story. It was from a time that I was in the hospital with him.

I have that game.

Do you have the game? This is the background for it. A few of us were in the hospital, probably 5 or 6 days before he passed away. We’re realizing things aren’t in the best place right now, but once you’re gone, you’re gone. We want to get these stories out. We started asking questions. What about when you were a kid? Tell us about Grandpa. Tell us one more story about this. What’s the legacy that you want to leave? That turned into a card game.

There was a break in us asking questions when a nurse came in to take some vitals or give him some medicine or something. He knew all the nurses at the time because they rotated through. You get to know him. He’s been going to Hopkins for a while. He looks at her and I’m going to call her Julie. He goes, “Julie, why is a giraffe’s neck so long?” She looks at him like, “Andy, what are you talking about?” He goes, “So it can reach his head.” Stupid dad joke. He knows things aren’t going well. He wants to make somebody smile. I can give you example after example, but that’s what I think of my dad. I think of him often as him trying to leave the world a little bit better than how he found it.

My father tried to leave the world a little bit better than how he found it. Share on X

 

One More Story And Nothing Left Unsaid

Thank you for that backstory. At what point did you start developing this game? Who helped you do that?

It was a natural progression of some of the things that we were doing. The first website that we launched had a few articles and blog posts. Here’s a list of places you should go. Here’s the information that I collected and why it’s important for you to find it. That turned into a product that you have called the Estate Preparation Package, which is now called the Clear Kit. People kept coming back to us going, “What else can we do?”

What we realized was that when you talk about comprehensive estate planning, it’s a lot more than having a will and having a trust. There’s a whole list of things that you need to do. I am a firm believer, and this is probably passed down from both of my parents, that having those relationships and understanding the people that you’re with is equally as important whether or not you can transition that bank account and save yourself an hour or two or save some dollars.

The One More Story game was an extension of that saying, how can I help other people have a positive memory like I had with my father? One More Story grew out of that. We worked with a game designer out of the Ukraine. We worked with a game designer in the US. We worked with clinical social workers to get the questions right. The printing is done in the United States. We have a great company. We went through a bunch of samples of the cards.

We focused on one that is poker-sized playing cards that have a linen feel. People with dexterity issues can hold it easily. It’s not going to slip. It’s color-coded on the categories. You can learn about what they are as you play through. Big font. It’s designed so that not only people my age but my parents can use it. People are taking it on dates now and buying it for hospice companies. It evolved. That’s where One More Story came from. Nothing Left Unsaid is the other game that we have, which grew out of One More Story, where it helps you ask those questions that the Clear Kit is for the Estate Preparation Package.

What’s the other game? I don’t think I have that.

I’m going to send you another one then. This may have come out after we sent it to you because it came out two times. Nothing Left Unsaid is the equivalent of the EPP, whereas it’s not going to do your will or make your trust for you. It’s going to ask, “Where is your will? Do you have a will? Who needs to be notified? How do you care about palliative care?” These are a few definitions that people might say. We’re trying to round that side of things out. Everything that we’re doing is born out of solving a problem that we think people are having based on the feedback that people are giving us.

Do you mind if I go over a couple of questions from the game that I do have?

Go ahead.

I like this because, as you said about the relationship with your dad, everyone does not have a good relationship. Everyone doesn’t know how to communicate, especially if we’re trying to initiate communication in an already difficult period of life. With Nothing Left Unsaid, if that’s the game, I can see how that can allow people to have conversations that they would not know how to start. That is a fun, engaging, and impromptu way to start getting some of that information out.

This game here, a quick start, shuffle the cards, draw a card, and read the questions. You mentioned all the different things that I noticed about the cards as far as the font size and the color. It’s not complicated. I can see how you can do this with friends over for dinner, or on a date when you’re trying to get to know someone. They’re not super-depth questions, but it’s enough to start a conversation. I’ve played this a couple of times on a TikTok live with some friends and doing that. This first card that I have here says, “One More Story. Tell me about a time you felt proud of yourself.”

Right now?

Yeah.

When you say that you’re using these on TikTok with other people, it’s working, which is amazing. I did not think I was going to be a game designer. I didn’t think I’d have this website. I didn’t think I had this company, but I am proud. I love it. You said that it’s easy enough for dinner. We released something last week called Death During Dinner, which is instructions on how to play this with your friends at dinner. I love this. This is when I’m proud.

I’ll let you pull a card and ask me.

I’m going to do one from the Nothing Left Unsaid one. This is a good one. Would you like your life celebrated through a charity or foundation in your name? Effectively, that goes to how you want your legacy to be remembered.

That’s going to be an easy one for me. I have started a foundation, Widowhood Real Talk with Tina, which is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit. It was not put in my name, but I am the founder of it. It was started because of the passing of my late husband. We were together for 32 years, and the work that I do, even this podcast, is intentional to serve people who are dealing with the grief of a loved one.

Interestingly enough, I’m drinking this tea because I have gotten bronchitis, and I have found that when I’m not feeling well, I think of the inevitable, that one day I will not be here. I’ve thought about how long I will have in life to live to continue this foundation, and what it will look like when I transition from this world.

When we’re here, the ability to make an impact in the world is important. I would want whatever impact I’ve made to proceed and last past myself and continue to help people. We finished an annual walkathon called Walk For Love. We had a goal that we tripled the fundraiser. We’re using that money to develop a grief garden in a low-income area and to conduct a butterfly release ceremony.

Oftentimes, when you don’t have a lot of money, you may not be able to take weeks or months off to manage your grief. You may be taken off those three days, and you’re back in the grind. For us to try to provide something that can help people with their mental capacity and encourage them and do things is part of what our foundation does. I would want that to continue.

I love it. Let’s make sure that gets in the show notes for you.

Thank you.

The reason why I flipped through a few cards is that I was in the assets and liability and insurance section. They didn’t want to ask you a question like, “Do you owe anybody money?” You can answer that.

I’ll say this about bronchitis because we had this conversation scheduled and then we had to cancel. I was like, “I am going to do this with you.” I’ll give you a funny story about me and the bronchitis. The first time that I found out I had bronchitis, our daughter was about two and a half, and I was a stay-at-home mom at that time. One day, I got up and I could not keep up with her. I’m an Army girl, so keeping up with a toddler wasn’t a thing, but I was exhausted. It came to the point that I called a girlfriend and said, “I can’t breathe,” and dropped the phone.

She had the ambulance medical at our home. I went to the hospital, and that is when we found out I was pregnant with my son. My friends say, “You go into the hospital, and then you come out pregnant. What were you guys doing in there?” It was devastating. I was like, “That is not what happened in the hospital.”

I’ll give you more time than that to know anyway.

Just to lock it in, I am sorry for the coughing, but I am committed to this conversation. We lived in Pennsylvania with extremely cold weather every year like clockwork, I would get bronchitis. When I moved back to Virginia, I thought I was free of this. This is probably only the second time since I’ve moved back and have gotten bronchitis.

I’m glad that you’re here. Drink your tea. Take your time. If you cough, that’s okay. Your story is not that unusual in a strange way. I have a very close friend who went to the hospital because he cracked a rib. They ran some tests and found out he had cancer while he was there. Because he fell, it ended up saving his life.

I hear that a lot.

That’s another story of how out of something painful can come good results. You have to run with it.

 

 

Estate Planning

It’s also what we focus on. You mentioned something earlier, and I’m not sure if it was in the pre-show conversation, but this is an inevitable part of life. The reality of having those things in place will make it easier for the person who is transitioning and their loved ones who have to still live on this side of reality and manage the different things that are required. I want to say this as we go into it. Some people may say, “I don’t have a super big estate,” or “I don’t have all this money.” I think people will be surprised at what they do have and how complicated it can be when someone doesn’t have a guide as far as how to manage what is left. What would you say to that?

That’s right. People like to say in the industry this stat that only one-third of Americans have a trust or a will. The reality is that 100% of Americans have an estate plan, whether you’ve done something or not. That means that if you die without a will, all of your belongings and everything that happens to you go through a process called intestate, which is determined by the state that you live in.

It is not difficult to put a basic will in place. It is not difficult to prepare yourself and to get your family the information that they need. As your estate grows and as your life situation changes and evolves, you can accumulate more things that may complicate that process, but if you start, you’re going to find out that you’re in a better place than where you started. You’re going to get the help that you need. Hopefully, there are lots of resources out there that can make that easier.

The best quote that I’ve heard about it was, “Leave your heirs the gift of organization.” That’s what you’re doing. On average, it takes 570 hours to administer an estate. That’s because you’re sending your family on a scavenger hunt. If you come over to my house, Tina, and we’re going to make dinner for people, and you walk in the door and we have the ingredients, what are we cooking tonight, you and me? What do you want to make?

Steak and some salmon. Roasted potatoes and asparagus.

I’m coming over for dinner. For real. That sounds great.

Let’s be clear. My current husband does the cooking. I do the eating. That’s why.

That’s okay. He’s coming over to cook with me. He comes in the door. We got the steak out. It’s a nice ribeye. We have the salmon and teriyaki glaze on it. We got potatoes. You got dessert. All the ingredients are there. We got the recipe. We got three hours before people came over. It is ready to go easy. That’s going to be a fun night.

If I invite him over to make dinner, the door is locked. He needs to kick down the door. I’m not there. He knows people are coming over later. He doesn’t know that the steaks. I didn’t buy it. He needs to go to the supermarket, but he has to talk to the manager for some reason to get the cut that we need. It’s going to be a lot more complicated.

That’s the problem that we’re trying to solve. We’re helping people get their information in order on their own with a professional, whatever fits their specific unique circumstance because everybody is different. That entire process for everybody else is easier. The reason why that is so important is that if something happens to you and you’re incapacitated, first of all, you want to empower your loved ones or heirs to advocate for you in the way that you want to be advocated for.

After something happens to you and you pass away, you also want to make their lives easier and not have to scramble. Does he want a funeral? Did he want to be cremated? Who should speak? What happens to his things? Are there things that I need to find? Is there a lockbox somewhere that I don’t know about or a bank account? How do I get access to that? There are so many different things that people don’t realize because you don’t do this every day. If you can get a little bit of help from somebody who knows it, it makes things so much easier for everybody.

Thank you. If someone said, “I’m married. My spouse is going to get everything already. They know where everything is. I don’t think I need to go through all this,” what would you say to them?

That could be true, but it might not be true. I had a gentleman in Virginia called me up. We had a conversation a few months ago. He was married with two kids, and he got a divorce. He updated his will. In the event something happened to him, both of his kids would have 50% each. That’s all he did. He was like, “I’m good to go. Do I need this kit? Somebody told me to call you. I want to learn about it.”

I asked him if he updated his payable on death beneficiaries. He went, “No, my will. I updated that. We’re good to go.” He didn’t realize that payable on-death beneficiaries on a bank account process before your will does because it’s a contractual relationship. His ex-wife was still going to get all the cash in the banks. There’s example after example of things like that.

There are those known knowns, the known unknowns, and the unknown unknowns that you may think things are going to be easy, but you might not realize that there are some things that are going to make it more complicated. Do you want things to be a little bit more private? Maybe you need a trust instead of a will because wills need to be filed with the local jurisdiction and go through probate.

Are there certain things that aren’t worth a lot of money, but you want somebody else to get it? Do you want someone to be able to advocate for you if you can’t advocate for yourself, like advanced directives and end-of-life care? What happens if both of you get in a car accident at the same time, and something happens? What happens to all your stuff? Who gets it then?

If you have a pet, what happens to your pet? How does he get fed? What about plants in your house? Who notifies your business partners if you work? You need to be able to set things up so if something were to happen to you, your family members and your loved ones can step in and handle your affairs on your behalf the way that you want, as seamlessly as possible. Saying, “I’ll do it later,” means that at the time when things are most stressful, you’re going to be trying to do the things that are the least enjoyable for you to do.

If I had a choice of talking to my dad about memories and things that he wanted to continue and stories that we share together so I had those memories of him or asking him where the password is for his Gmail account and how to unlock his phone, what do you think I want to be doing? It’s not the latter. That’s the long answer to a very good question.

Thank you. Often, we make this statement as if something would happen. It seems even too hard to say the reality is when something will happen.

I learned that the other day. Everybody dies. Who knew? It’s amazing. Every single day in America, 10,000 people turn 65. By the end of the decade, there are going to be more people 65 and older than under, and twice as many 65-year-olds than there are now. The Sambush generation, 40 years and older, 15% of them are caring for themselves and their kids and or a parent. That number is only going to increase.

The stat that got me is that women who are married to men in the United States outlive their husbands by 5.8 years on average. If you look at traditional family values, I’m not saying that this is the way it is always, but oftentimes there’s a division of labor in a family. If the male is doing the finances and the female is not, it’s not to say she can’t do it, but she’s going to have to figure out how to pay the bills, where they get paid from, and whether there are auto pays, and situations she might not be familiar with. I don’t want that to happen to anybody because that’s hard to figure out when you’re not stressed.

That’s the type of thing that people don’t think about. “I got a will. The stuff is going to pass over to them.” That’s great, but do they know how to pay the bills? Do they know what’s going to be paid? Do they know that property tax goes through your mortgage if you have one? Do they know that if you miss your rent by 30 days, they’re going to evict you or start those procedures? That’s what you need to figure out. Without somebody walking you through it or a checklist or three, it can be pretty daunting to figure out on your own.

Without somebody walking through the checklist with you, estate planning can be pretty daunting to figure out on your own. Share on X

 

Going Through A Loved One’s Computer

I would agree. I was working full-time when my husband passed. You mentioned something about having someone’s password to get into their phone. The level of complication involved in being able to validate the Google password and the different accounts that are linked, and how we are dependent on technology, whether you’re opening your loved one’s computer because a lot of people have their own. He and she or she and she, your partner, you have your own computer, and you’re doing your own thing. How often do you log into your loved one’s computer and start going through things?

My dad had a mind where if I said, “Dad, I need the bill for the roof that you put on the house and it got repaired twenty years ago,” he’d say, “Go to the office. Go to the file cabinet, left side, second drawer down, fourth file back. It’s there.” It’s very different from, “Adam, I think it’s in the office somewhere, go look for it.” It’s crazy the evolution of those paper-based files to digital. It used to be when somebody passed away and you wanted to know what accounts they had, you checked the mail for a few months because after they stopped paying the bills, you’d get a letter that said, “You’re delinquent.”

Now, it goes to email. If you don’t understand what that means, it means that you have to understand how to access their phones, their computers, have access to them, two-factor authentication for many things, and password resets. You have to have the legal ability to do that because you’re not supposed to break into somebody’s phone.

There’s a question of what happens to somebody’s digital legacy. You have photos on your phone. Do you want your family members to get those? Do you want them to be deleted? You have Facebook accounts or LinkedIn accounts. What happens to those? Do you want your other accounts to be shut down? Your digital persona and your digital legacy are as important as your bank accounts because they’re all linked. It’s as important as the other stuff that you have. It’s all linked. It’s a lot more complicated than people think.

Your digital legacy now is just as important as your bank accounts because they're all linked. Share on X

 

Estate Information Binder

We’ve discussed the reality of how unfortunate it is to have this information. The first item I’d like to go over is the estate information binder. You mentioned briefly how it has evolved. Can you talk about that a little bit more?

The version that you have is called the Estate Preparation Package. In that, you had a Getting Started folder. You had two binders. One was the Estate Information binder and the other one was the Health and Legacy binder. Those were binders that are designed to capture all of the information that you need. The estate information binder, we can go into the details of it, but effectively, that’s where you put your background, your family background, your assets, your liabilities, and things that you don’t want other people to know about. Those are the core of the estate.

The other binder, the bright orange one, custom manufactured, faux leather, feels nice. That is brightly colored so you can take it with you to the hospital if you need to or your doctor’s office. It has your medical records, medical history, key contact information of who needs to be called, worksheets that are several pages long for what you want to have happen at your end of life, summary sheets of your wills, of your trusts, of your ethical will, your legacy will, legacy messaging, and things of that nature. We put that out, and it was called the estate preparation package.

We showed it to a company that manufactures more than a third of all the caskets in America, which is neat. When you think about buying a car, you want to buy a Ford or a Porsche or something, you go to the dealership to buy that brand. When you’re thinking about buying a casket, you know those brands. You go to the funeral home normally, maybe you buy it in advance, and you say, “What are the options?” They explain it to you and you buy it. You don’t care about who the manufacturer is.

Some companies are very deeply involved in the end-of-life industry. When they saw what we did, they said that it was the most comprehensive end-of-life repository of information they’ve ever seen. We took a lot of time to develop these. It was one of the problems that we had. There’s so much information in the estate information binder that people say, “I don’t even know where to start,” so we relaunched it.

It’s no longer the estate preparation package, which also sounded a little bit like a service. They’re called Clear Kits. It’s a comprehensive legacy and estate administration repository kit that has three binders. We split the first binder into two, so it’s a little bit more manageable. It has personal information, heritage, and pets. When you get to the technology side of things in the first binder, so technology, liabilities, tax, insurance, then that goes in your real estate assets, your financial assets, your physical assets, your business interests, and things of that nature. That’s binder two.

The third binder, which was the health and legacy binder is for your final affairs, medical, and legal. I’m happy to talk about all of that. It’s 8 1/2 by 11 sheets, and the USB drive that comes with it, and the high-end custom-designed colored tabs help people find the information that they need, but that’s the evolution of what you have. It’s pretty neat.

I appreciate the level of care that was taken not just to provide the information and guide but to make it appealing. This is a difficult conversation to have. Aesthetically pleasing to the eye and touch adds value to that. This has come a long way from the spreadsheet that you made for your mom. In the beginning, there’s a welcome and the adult portfolio. You have the person’s name on there, personalized to say that this is about you.

It makes you feel like you come into the hotel and they have your name on the marquee and they go, “Hi, welcome for your stay.” This is personalized, the care that’s given to that. The beginning tablets have general information. It warms you up to some basic things that you need to cover. The color has changed, I know, but the tabs go from red to orange to yellow. What are the sections that that represents?

This is fun. My mom helped with that, which is funny. We had multiple different sets of tabs in different colors that I liked and a few other people liked because this was not just me that was designing this package. My mom comes in and says, “The tab colors are all out of order.” I’m like, “What are you talking about?” She said, “Adam, people like rainbows.” We align them in colors to go through, and each section has its own specific color. It turns out that just by eye, she was able, with the spectrum, to see there were only two colors that were reversed.

It goes through on a color-coded basis in each of the binders to make it so the information is color-coded within the section that they’re in. The white labels are always the header tab. Start here, adult profile. The general information is about them. The family information about them. The next section is the child profiles, the grandchild profiles, and the non-minor dependents. There’s a profile section, which is neat. We worked with a veterinarian on that.

I wanted to pause right there to talk about the pets because that is a big concern for people. Your children are, but we’re in a world where some people do not have children. Their pets are their children. People often bequest a lot to their pets and they care for them and things of that nature. I must say the pet section, the idea of that, what keyed you into that? Are you a pet person or working with people and realizing their needs?

A little bit of both and a lot of both. We have a dog. His name is Zeke. He’s our director of marketing. You have to have fun with it. He’s a little Cavapoo. We have a cat as well. The reality is that a lot of what we’ve done is based on interviews and experience that has evolved over time. An unknown fact is that one of the most frequent updates for people’s estate plans, once you hit 55 and older if you already have everything in place, is making provisions for pets.

You’ve already taken care of your kids. That’s not going to change very much. You have to update when you move, major life events, and things of that nature. Pets are part of the family. If something were to happen to you, you want people to not only know who gets the pet but also what it eats. When does it eat? Where are the vet records? What happens to it? The pet profile is as long, if not longer, than the profile of your kids.

I was going to say that but I was trying not to because I was like, “Okay.”

You can.

The pet profile is pretty thick here.

You don’t have to fill everything out though. Fill out what you can, and everything you put in it is designed to help the person who needs to utilize it and leverage it. We want to make sure that we provide the information in case somebody needs it. The pet profile was developed with a local veterinarian, just like when we went through the assets and liabilities. We went to certified financial planners and financial advisors. It takes a village to build this thing.

There’s a reason why it took us a while to get it out. We went through many revisions, and the physical design of it as well. It doesn’t look like somebody made it on Word. This is a professional designer that we used multiple times to make sure that everything was okay with copywriting and copy editing, and that the columns and the spaces have enough area and space for you to write the responses in. It’s a labor of love.

Would you mind if I go over a little bit of what’s on the pet profile?

Let’s do it.

It talks about general information, the type of animal, and the breed. Somebody who’s not the owner of your pet knows it’s a dog. If you don’t go into those details, they will not know. The acquisition information, that’s important for someone about to take on loving your pet, and all they know is the dog’s name is Barkie and nothing else. This lays it out. To talk about the primary care provider of your pet, how many people know their other friends, the veterinarian?

My husband has a service dog. We went there, I could not tell you the name of the veterinarian. We were right outside there. I don’t know that information. There are different types of veterinarians to be able to know what is the one taken for this or for that. The preference behavior of your pet, to be able to lay that out, daily care and routine, and pet insurance, the details of that. This is more than just you think somebody knows everything and not give them.

You have that because oftentimes people may have more than one pet. To be able to lay that out and to consider the details that are being provided. When you hear that, you go, “I should share that information.” It would make that easier because your pet is going to be distressed when you’re no longer here. The easier someone can lean in and keep your pet’s routine consistent is going to make it easier for them too.

You don’t have to fill it out if you don’t have it or if you don’t have all the information for it, but we want to make it so that in the event that you do have it, it makes it easier for those coming after you for temper or not. There are these unintended consequences that people might think about. To give you a little bit of a glimpse, the reason why we want to know where the pet acquisition was or did you adopted it versus not.

There are some people that if you buy a purebred dog, you’re not allowed to donate that dog to a kennel or turn it over. You have to give it back to that individual if it’s not going to a home. There are a lot of things that we didn’t even realize had to be included or should be included. Where are the pet’s favorite toys? It’s not just the pet section. I like talking about the pet section because people love pets.

That’s why I lay it there too.

We have this level of detail for every single section, for housing, for internet access, security, you name it. The reason why is you can’t get through all of your information in twenty pages because this is your life. Maybe that’s what the name of the package should have been, the LifeBinder, the life book.

In the next section, how many email addresses do you have?

I have my personal address. I have the Buried In Work address. I have Foster Lee, which is the company that Buried In Work is technically under. We have consulting contracts and things through that. Primarily three, but there are legacy ones that are like old Wash U where I went to college.

When I looked at this, I had one for work. I have one for Widowhood. I have a Gmail account for bills, one for personal, and different things like that. The idea of laying out this section here with the passwords and the email addresses is not something that you can put together. You start this, you put it down, you come back to it, and you think about it. What is the recommendation or timeline for a person to, “I received a binder today?” What is the best way to start leaning in to complete everything?

Every Clear Kit comes with a blue booklet that says Getting Started. In the front of the one that you got, the Start Here section, that’s the interview checklist. We’ll get to that in a minute. That’s what you do after you start figuring things out. April 16th, the day after you pay taxes, you go through and you go, “What’s happened in my life that I need to update in this binder?” You should have one getting started as well. If not, then it was added afterward.

I think it was added afterward.

Open up your Start Here page, and there’s going to be a list of a few sections that you should fill out first.

This one?

Getting started. This will tell you the specific sections in both binders that we think are the most important ones for you to figure out. Fill it out and start there. Work your way through. Every once in a while, you come back to the binder. It’s great if you do it with a friend and keep yourself on target, but this will take some time to fill out. This is not a quick thing. Many of the sections themselves are quick. You can do your entire general information section without the family narrative because people can get detailed there in probably under half an hour. Once that’s in there, your Social Security number is not changing. Your name is not changing.

Your past residential history, which is cool to find your unclaimed property. We have a list on our site of all the databases that you can search to find unclaimed property based on where you live. That’s one thing that’s neat about this. The kits aren’t standalone. They link back to the repositories of information on the website. We have 1,800 articles, 100-plus checklists, and guides. We have twenty directories that are relaunching from service providers and others, quizzes, games, and a whole host of stuff. This all ties back in now with QR codes and different things, but focus on the key sections in the getting started packet and then go back and fill in more information as it becomes needed for you.

This is something an individual can fill out on their own, or do they have to get with their lawyer, their medical provider, or financial advisor? How would this work?

I love that question. Everything in here, you should be able to fill out on your own. Several sections can benefit from letting those individuals know that you have it. Here’s why. One is that you can say, “Here’s my medical section. I want you to fill this out for me,” and they’ll do it for you. That’s their job. It makes it easier and saves time.

Two is it empowers them to give you a better level of service. If you don’t have an attorney who’s helped you with your will, that’s completely okay because you can do it yourself. On the website, there’s a list of all the requirements for every 50 states on what makes a will legally binding in your state because it changes from state to state. If you go to an attorney that charges $150 an hour or $400 an hour and say, “Here’s all my information,” they’re going to be able to make your will and service you better, faster, saving you money. It effectively pays for the estate preparation package or the Clear Kit because they have the information that they need on the one hand.

On the other hand, if your financial planner knows what your lawyer did and knows what your doctor did, they’re all going to be able to work in your ecosystem that is your life and give you a better result more effectively. It’s hard to do financial planning if you don’t know where the assets are or what the will is because the lawyer may say, “Not only do you have a will, but you have a trust. What needs to be put into the trust?” They should talk to your financial planner and figure that out. It takes a village.

If you’re getting started in your estate planning roadmap, all this you can do yourself. If you evolve over time and you’re lucky and you have one house and two houses and three houses and four kids and two past marriages and seven grandkids, things start getting even more complicated in the decision tree. That’s when you want to start involving more and more people to look this stuff over.

Once I’ve completed this, what do I put in the house? What do I do with it?

Don’t put it in the bank. That’s the one thing because you need your family members to know where it is. You also don’t want it in your kitchen because you don’t need to be looking at this stuff every single day. Keep it in a place that’s not going to be wet. Some people want to put it in their basement or something. Don’t put it there because you want it to be easily accessible. Oftentimes, somebody’s closet in their office is a good place for it. The thing is not as important where you put it, but who knows where the information is. It goes back to that example that we talked about when your husband is coming over to make steak with me. If he came over and he didn’t know where the steak was, he couldn’t make steak. It doesn’t make sense.

If something happens to you and they need to know what your medical preferences are because you’re in the hospital, they can’t go on a scavenger hunt in your house looking for this stuff. You have to make sure that your loved ones, if you’re married, your spouse, maybe your two kids are going to get involved. Your attorney knows that it exists. In the event that something happens, they can get access to it quickly. That’s important. Secure and knowledge about where it is.

The idea of putting it in a safe?

Don’t do it. The estate information binder that you have, that can go in a safe. That makes sense. That can go there. Your health binder, you want it accessible for people to understand where it is. The reason why I say safe is I don’t necessarily mean the safe in your house or a safety deposit box in a bank. What oftentimes happens is people are like, “I have all this stuff. I put my will in the bank. Go and get it.” The bank’s not necessarily going to let your next of kin go into the bank account until they have letters of administration, which come after you pass away because you don’t have power of attorney. They’re not going to see any of this stuff for three weeks to four months. That’s not helpful. You have to make sure that the people who need the information have access to the information when they need it.

You have to make sure that the people that need the information have access to the information when they actually need it. Share on X

Thank you for explaining that. Going through the additional tabs that are here, listing, and you mentioned before oftentimes we won’t know what accounts people have because we don’t have hard mail coming like we used to. To be able to lay out the amount of properties that you have, the addresses, the accompanying mortgages, I thought it was very interesting, the recurring deposits. There are so many things, not just one’s paycheck. People may have a VA disability. They may have an annuity payment and go on and on and how to contact that. It’s not a check coming in the mail, but it is these automatic deposits that are going on and how you navigate that.

I love that you took the time to go through all of this. I’ve done a few of these podcasts and they’ll go, “This is great. I liked your games,” but you can tell they’ve done a skim over. You have gone into this, and I’m impressed. Thank you. You’re picking up on all the things that we want people to notice that are important to learn as you go through it because there’s stuff that you might not think about. In the next section after the recurring deposits, there’s the important payment section where it says, “Is this an important one that we have to care about?” I don’t care if Netflix doesn’t get paid, but the house needs to be.

The credit cards, the list of those, and I did take a lot of time in doing this. The reason is that my audience is people who have lost a loved one. They may be the surviving parent needing to make sure things are in order for their children. Maybe a child is thinking about, “My mom needs to have things in order.” These are people who have been touched by the reality that our mortality has a limitation.

Having something like this, if they’re going to invest their money to purchase this, I want to give them a sense of what they would be investing in for their well-being and their loved ones. Just to go, “Here’s a book with a couple of tabs,” is not going to be enough for me to want to lean in and go to your website and look at what it is you have to offer and what that is. Before we go into the health binder, can you navigate us through your website and show us a little information there?

Buried In Work

When you come to the website, the tagline is “Organize your estate before it’s too late.” That rotates with different things. Effectively, what we’re trying to show people is that we’re here to help. The content that we have is getting picked up by periodicals, websites, news, and podcasts around the country, which is awesome. The quality of what we’re doing is why the image on the front page is the way it is. This is custom stitching and custom manufactured. This is not something that you buy off the shelf. As you said earlier, it has my name on it.

This is personal. It’s personal for us. It’s personal for you. We want to recognize that. As you go down the main page, you create your Clear Kit. There are multiple different types you can get for one person or two people. We have an estate preparation roadmap that is free. You can walk through it. It says, first, “Here’s a free estate summary worksheet.” It’s three pages long. It is the simplest version of the Clear Kit possible. It says, “Do you have a will? Do you have a trust? Who’s your attorney? Where are your bank accounts? Where are your assets and liabilities?”

It’s free. If you do nothing at all other than come to the website, please go to the roadmap and download that free estate summary worksheet. It’s the least you can do for your loved ones. If you need help creating a will, we have relationships now where we will say, “Here’s a quiz for you. You can create your will. There are three ways. You can do it on your own, you can do it online, or you can do it with an attorney. We’ll help you figure out what’s best for you.”

The same thing with Create Events Directives. We’re partnering with a neat company, video-based directives that give you ID cards that go in your wallet in case something happens to you, so doctors understand what your wishes are. The company’s called Medio. You can come in here and find out. We have a podcast. People came to us and said, “You’ve been on our podcast. What other podcasts do you think that we should listen to?”

A lot of people are reaching out to us. We’re reaching out to other people. Let’s share the free research that we did. There are 125 podcasts in 6 or 7 different categories, from aging, elder care, hospice care, palliative care, legal, estate planning, and end-of-life. We have a section for funeral and end-of-life traditions. If you are Jewish, Christian, Muslim, non-secular, or LGBTQ+, we have long guides, helpful information, and articles to help you plan funerals.

I’m Jewish, what prayer should be said here? That’s a whole section there. We have our card games that we talked about. It’s One More Story, Nothing Left Unsaid, and then Death During Dinner, which is the worksheet to help you host your own dinner, which is cool. We have a bunch of checklists. The one that is used the most on the website is the end-of-life checklist, or the “What to Do After Somebody Passes Away.”

It’s 56 steps to take after somebody passes away that you probably don’t know. It grows. It could be 56 today, it could be 72 tomorrow. It won’t be 72 tomorrow, but it could be. There’s a whole host of checklists. If you have trouble starting a conversation with your parents, we have resources for that too. There’s a service that we will get on Zoom with your mom, your dad, or your family.

We will walk you through our end-of-life checklist worksheet, and we will walk you through the estate summary worksheet. We won’t fill out all the information because we don’t know what your assets and liabilities are, but we’ll explain what’s important. By the time they walk away, they’re going to understand that you care about having this conversation.

It gives you a quiz where you can figure out for you or somebody else’s estate how prepared you are if something were to happen to them on a scale of 1 to 10, and then prompts based on those that you can then cut, paste, and text your parents, “Mom, Dad, I took this quiz and I’m worried about the results. Let’s go talk.” A lot of things there.

We have directories that we mentioned, from grief coaches and counselors to home healthcare agencies, funeral information, final resting place locations, hospice palliative care, and estate planning attorneys. Those are coming online. We relaunched those and there are over 20,000 listings already that are in there. People are coming in to claim and put in extra information.

We have directories to find unclaimed property in every single state and federal database. If you have a gym membership, let’s say you don’t pay your bills for a while, or you paid but cancel your membership, and they can’t give you the refund, they can’t just keep that money and turn it over to the state. You would be surprised how much money states are holding in people’s names. This is a free way for you to search to find that cash. We helped somebody find $30,000 a few weeks ago, which is neat.

Closing online accounts. Someone called us up and said, “I’m in the hospital. My mom fell and hit her head. I’m in the emergency room waiting, and the people next to me, I’m overhearing their conversation because I can’t help it.” I want to help them. They’re saying that they’re having trouble getting in touch with Amazon because they need to get access to somebody’s account for some reason. We reached out to close to 100 companies in the country, and we have their customer service information and what to do in the event something happens to transition people’s accounts.

We have an issue called “Ask Three Questions.” These are the three questions you need to ask of every single account that you have, both financial, insurance, and whatnot that help you figure out who gets the benefits of the accounts, who can talk to them in the event something happens to you, and what happens to the account itself. I can keep going and going. There’s a lot of stuff on the website, but that’s scrolling down on checklists, directories, and planned giving campaigns. We’re helping out with state-specific resources. We have a ton of templates now that people can download too.

Unclaimed Property

I want to say something about the unclaimed property. Sometimes people feel like that’s not legitimate or it’s folklore. I can say from my own experience and friends who have had parents that have passed, to go in there. I’m glad that you have all 50 states because it’s not just looking up someone’s name. It’s any place where they resided over their life, where they may have had accounts established.

I found, with my late husband, from being in the military, remembering all the different states, and there was a telephone bill that had been closed out in some place we lived. I’m not sure if it was the deposit or whatever it was, but there was money left, and I was able to find at least six different checks in different areas. It’s not something you do at once. You want to go back maybe 3 or 4 years because of the processing time, but I’ll let you get into that. Go ahead.

In the first binder, did you notice there was a tab that said “Past residential history?” That is specifically why. It’s so people can go back and find this information. I love stats. There’s an association because I live in DC. There’s an association for everything. There’s an association for directors of associations. There’s one that’s the National Association of Unclaimed Property Administrators, NAUPA. They say that 1 in 7 Americans have unclaimed property, which means that there are 33 million people in America who haven’t claimed something that the governments are holding onto. The average of claims that are out there per person that has it is $2,080 each.

It is 100% legitimate. You search on your address, you search on your name in the state that you’re in, and then you normally have to fill out a form, and they ask for your ID, some information of why you think it’s yours. They send you a check. The government doesn’t want that money. They’re holding it. It’s your money. Take it back.

I did have to provide my late husband’s death certificate because some of the items were in his name, and to be able to show that. I do want to circle back to one item that we’ve mentioned a lot, will and trust. Oftentimes, people hear those terms and they seem to be the same, and don’t quite know the difference between them. Could you elaborate on those?

Will & Trust

If you want to come to the website and get into it, in our guide section, we have an entire guide that is the difference between wills and trusts. A will, which is also known as a last will and testament, is a legal document that communicates your final wishes regarding the distribution of your assets but also can include instructions for guardianship of minors, care of pets, and other personal directives, things of that nature.

If you don’t have a will, that means that the government is going to dictate the order of operations of how your estate gets divvied up. That’s the intestate process that we talked about earlier. A trust, I’m going to simplify things for the audience. A trust is effectively a legal arrangement that says that somebody is going to hold on to your assets and manage them for you within that trust. There are dozens of different types of trusts with different reasons for why you want to look at them.

If you don't have a will, the government is going to dictate that order of operations of how your estate gets divided up. Share on X

High level and a lot of people say, “You use tax trusts for tax avoidance and different things.” The main issue between trust and a will for most people is privacy. That’s what it comes down to. You can go online and find wills from very famous people and understand what they did with their stuff because wills have to be filed with the state. Trusts don’t have to be. Trusts are private because you’re taking the ownership out of you and putting it into this other entity. Your will will say, “His stuff is this, yada, yada, yada,” but the trust is just the trust is this.

If you want all of your hidden wishes hidden items, that’s where you go for a trust. I don’t want to get into the details of each one. There are ladybird trusts and there are pour-over provisions and wills. In the event that you pass away, all of your provisions or all of your items automatically go into a trust. Trusts can be revocable or irrevocable. There are different reasons for that. Trusts can help protect your assets for a certain period of time. In the event that you do have to go into an assisted living facility later, they can’t call back some of your assets. There’s a bunch of stuff, but that’s the difficult and confusing way. Will, you can do it on your own if you need to. Trust, do not do it on your own. Get an attorney to help you out.

When we’re already talking about a conversation that is difficult, now we’re incapacitated and our loved ones need to speak on our behalf. The information that is in this health and legacy is extremely important because even though we’re cohabitating with people, I don’t know if people talk about their health to this level of detail to make it manageable for someone else.

Health And Legacy

That’s the truth of it. Sometimes people don’t have those conversations. It can be difficult. There are two sides to that coin. The one side is the legal side of what people have to do or should be doing. There’s the other side of, “I want this to happen.” You can have legally binding advance directives, and advance directives mean different things in different states. They say, “This is what I want to have happen in regard to my care,” or you can leave a legacy message that says, “I want this to happen. Here’s what I want people to think about as they’re making those decisions for me.”

That’s why I said earlier that you’re unique like everybody else. You get to figure out what your situation is, how you want to proceed, and where you are in life. Maybe when you’re twenty years old, you don’t believe in cremation, but later on in life, you go, “You know what? I am okay with that because I don’t want to take up the land for some reason,” or “Now I want a green burial, or I want to be turned into a coral reef, or shot into space or turned into a tree.”

You're unique just like everybody else. You get to figure out what your situation is, how you want to proceed, and where you are in life. Share on X

My daughter and I talked about that. She and I both want to be the tree plant. Her dad was cremated. The idea of doing that, laying out your health profile, a lot of times I think people think, “What’s the medication I’m taking and who are my doctors?” If you know that, you know enough.

Knowing who the doctors are is a very good step, but you want to have a situation where the doctors who are treating you have access to the information when they need it. Think of it in two steps. Comprehensive estate planning is that entire journey throughout your life, from before you’re sick if you get sick, to when you’re getting care, to passing away after, in the transition of your assets. If you get hit by that proverbial bus, it doesn’t matter in the near term who your rheumatologist is. It doesn’t matter who your treating doctor is for your cancer or some other ailment that you have.

The people who are treating you, trying to keep you alive, and triaging that situation must have the information that they need right then. What is your blood type? Do you have allergies? Who needs to be contacted? Should you be intubated? Should you not be? Having the critical information in one place is important. As things progress throughout life and throughout your care, you can leverage the other bits of resources.

What we’ve done is designed the health and legacy binder that you have so no matter where you are in your journey, if you are gradually progressing into an instance where you need care in a home, they have all the information that they need to service you better and make your stay as nice as it is. In the event that you get hit by that bus and you rush to the hospital, or your child rushes to the hospital, and the doctors say, “What do we need to know?” They go, “Everything you need to know is right here.”

If you go through the full process and you even get the advance directives that we encourage, the recommended vendor, you’ll have the card in your wallet that kicks off everything even faster than that. Just like we have three different sections on the website, how do we create a will? Do it yourself, online services with a lawyer, we’ve created it so no matter what your circumstance is, if you are progressing, if there’s an immediate thing, or something else, it covers all of those different avenues. Just saying, “I have my doctor written it down and they can find out in the house,” is not sufficient.

You have three different sections in this particular binder, the red, the white, and the orange. Can you describe what’s covered in those different sections?

They’re broken up to make sure that you have the information about, and you have your key contacts logged in the red. The red section is your key contacts and your medical information, the stuff that helps you prep for that. The white sections in there are the key tabs of the sections that you’re in, so the explanation tabs. The orange sections in the back are about your legacy, which are your legal documents.

It is a step process, red is most important for critical responders/ Orange is your before I forget messages, your legacy messaging, and your other and revoked directives because a lot of people don’t realize that if you revoke directives from somebody, you should tell people. If they come in and say, “I’m the proper person that can make this decision,” the person who is the actual proper person can go, “No, we can rebut it.” That’s the legal side of things.

A medical power of attorney, financial power of attorney. I’m going backward. Trust, your digital legacy, your ethical will, your last will and testament, your organ, tissue, and body donation. Caveat, organ, tissue, and body donation. If you want to donate your body to science, 1) You have to set that up long in advance so it won’t be like the day of, “I want to donate it.” 2) Make sure you’re stipulating very clearly what you want to have happen to you.

Somebody donated their mom’s body to science and medical research, and it turns out that the body was sold to the military to blow up because it was science. See what happens in testing. Be very careful about that. End-of-life directives. What I think is probably the most important one, other than the will and trust information, so they can find it, is your final resting place instructions worksheet, which walks your loved ones in and will save them so much time and energy, and help you think about what you want to have happen to you. That’s that. There’s a lot of information in here.

I’m not sure of this little packet here. Can you talk about those?

CLEAR Kit

One is a key kit. I walked into my dad’s office, and there was a box on his desk. On my desk, there are keys in it. There aren’t keys in it on my desk. There are keys in it on his desk. The keys, you have no idea what they go to. I did a kit that helps you identify what the keys are in your house, easily in one place for a spare copy. If something were to happen to you, you can put multiple keys in it, and then you pull out the card and you go, “Key one is the front door. Here’s the key that you need for this.”

The other one is a fridge magnet and ice magnet in case of emergency that gives you critical information so that in the event something were to happen to you like you slip and fall, they can come and find you at the fridge and make sure that the people that need to know what they need to know have the information they need. We’re trying to create this ecosystem that helps people out.

My husband was an electrician, and he had so many keys. There were so many keys around the house. We had multiple properties, trying to understand which key belonged to which address. When you are in the fog of grief, you cannot comprehend your diminished mental capacity in the state in which you will operate. If you’re not there, I’ve never experienced it. You think, “I’m going to think and go through stuff and get things in order.” That is not where you’re at to be able to do that. This last binder that we have here, can you talk a little bit about this one?

That is our critical document storage notebook. People think that it’s just a plastic. It’s fiberglass that’s coated in silicone, which is fire and water-resistant.

I did not know that.

We need to do better branding then. If you open it up, there’s an expansion folder area in it, a place to store cards and credit cards. What we thought is for people with basic estate information, your most critical documents can go in this, and it can travel with you as well. In the event that your house burns down, this will melt and burn down too, but it’ll give you a few extra minutes so you can grab it if it’s on the way out. It’s important that people have all their stuff organized. We think that by keeping these in your kit, the two binders and the black book together is important.

In the new Clear Kit, the three binders and the black one, I assume we’re going to have a bigger box as well if you have even more information that you want to store. We keep getting feedback on iterating and iterating, and it’s neat. The Clear Kit content is done, and we’re making tiny tweaks to make it so it integrates better with our website and is even more engaging for people to use.

When you talk about a box, I went through it, but this is the box that it comes in, so you can see the size. There’s a handle right here, and you open it up, and everything is included in there.

The message there too when you open up the box. Congratulations on taking the next step to an organized estate. If something were to happen to you and somebody opens it up, they understand what’s in the actual box. We’ve oversized the box as well. When you open it up, you notice that there is the shipping material on top. Things didn’t bounce around. That wasn’t just for shipping because if you have extra documents that you want to keep together, the box is going to store it too. We paid more money for air to make it easier for people to store more stuff.

These are the types of things that we’re trying to think about. There’s a handle on it, so you can carry it like a briefcase. When you talk about learning from other people, when we first worked with a designer, we had the Buried In Work logo on the front of it. The person said, “You need to switch your logo around.” We’re like, “What are you talking about? When I’m opening up the box, it makes sense to face me.” He goes, “ When you hold it like a suitcase, you want people to read the logo.”

That is one of the best simple examples of how important it is for us to collaborate with experts around the country in their specific jurisdiction. It’s not just me or a few other people that are putting this stuff together. The number of people who weighed in on what we’re doing to make the entire ecosystem of products and resources that we’re creating better for everybody has made this what we believe to be the most comprehensive resource that is only going to get better.

I can agree. It is a well-developed product. When you thought about us having this conversation, were there some things that you wanted to cover that we maybe did not dive into?

I think we’ve gone through 99% of what I think is important. One thing that’s surprising for me, if you have people who are working in HR or for companies where people can make decisions, we thought we were building this originally to help people individually, but companies have been coming to us surprisingly, which is great. Our content and our products are being offered as HR benefits. We’re working with religious organizations. There are boutiques and holiday sales that we’re being asked to go to and conferences. People are using these as fundraisers.

We’ll give a referral fee or an affiliate fee back, so it works out for more people to get more prepared because, effectively, for every one of these that gets sold, it means that somebody’s life is going to be a little bit better. If we can even work with organizations to help them get these out to their members, that’s great too. If you have ideas for us, get in touch with us. It’s easy to find us on the website. My email address is also Adam@BuriedInWork. We’re not difficult to find. I’d love to chat.

You also mentioned that there was a special discount code for anyone who tuned in to this episode and reached out to you. Do you want to talk about that a little bit more?

I’m happy to set that up. We’ll do Real Talk for the code, and I’ll get you 10% off of the Clear Kit, not the bundles because those are already discounted, but the Clear Kit itself will give everybody 10% off.

I have asked you a ton of questions, Adam. Thank you so much for sharing this product with my audience. Do you have any questions for me?

I have one question for you. You’ve interviewed a lot of people. You’ve seen how the ebbs and flows of this journey can go. You’ve asked a lot of insightful questions. What’s one question that you wish people asked you?

That’s a good question. No one has asked me that. I’ve never thought about what I wanted someone to ask me, but I would want them to ask a question that they can leverage the information to help someone else. I want to say it’s about a nine-year average before we have the death of a loved one who is very close to us. Everyone’s life is important, but my relationship with my male parent is not the same as the relationship I have with my husband. The relationship I have with my children may not be the same as with a next-door neighbor. The proximity of the loved one dying is not something we experience on a regular basis.

If you’re able to connect with someone who has experienced the death of a loved one with whom they had a close relationship, take that information to leverage it to support other people who may be in your ecosystem and may need your support. We often say things that are status quo, and that do not have value to the person who is suffering. Be able to hold that safe space for them and understand. Don’t show up with your logic. Meet them with your emotions and know it is difficult. Sit there, and you don’t have to have an answer. This is not fixable. When you commit to doing something for someone, show up and do it because they need you.

 

 

I love it. Thank you.

You’re welcome. I’ll allow you to close out this conversation. Thanks for that question.

The last thing I’ll say is to come to the website BuriedInWork.com. If there are free resources that you can leverage, that’s fantastic. If you need something we don’t have, please let us know. You can buy the Clear Kit for yourself or a loved one. That’s phenomenal. That lets us fund a lot of the development of more resources. Tina, we appreciate you having us on. Thank you.

Thank you. Have a good day.

 

Important Link

• Buried In Work

 

About Adam Zuckerman

Adam Zuckerman is the Founder of Buried in Work, a leading eCommerce platform specializing in estate planning/organization, end-of-life tasks, and estate transitions.

With a deeply personal motivation stemming from his experience managing his father’s estate, Adam is dedicated to simplifying these complex processes for individuals and families nationwide.

As an Eisenhower Fellow, attorney, and MBA, Adam brings a wealth of expertise to his role, combining legal knowledge with entrepreneurial vision to drive innovation in the field of estate planning.

Adam’s mission is to empower individuals of all ages to navigate the intricacies of estate planning with confidence and ease. Through Buried in Work, he seeks to revolutionize the way people approach end-of-life preparations, ensuring that everyone has access to the resources they need to secure their legacy and protect their loved ones.