Free guide · for adult children & families
Free Guide: How to Start the Will Conversation
A free 14-page PDF for the conversation about wills, wishes, and where everything actually is — the one families keep postponing. It is a free slice of the Having the Talk playbook: the idea the method turns on, four openings that tend to work and three that tend to backfire, and all twelve of Sitting One's questions — the ones to ask your parents, in the words you would actually use. It has you write down where a thing is kept and who holds it, never a password, PIN, account number, door or alarm code, or safe combination. It is general guidance, not legal, medical, tax, or financial advice.
Take it with you — free, no signup
Direct download. No email, no account — just the file.
What it does
- Teaches the one distinction the rest of the method rests on: does anyone else KNOW a thing, and does a findable document HOLD it? Those two questions give four positions — Settled, Fragile, Buried, and Open.
- Reframes the task: talking can only move the knowing half, and it can never write a document. So a good talk ends in a short errand list, not in “done.”
- Gives you four openings that tend to work, printed word for word — starting with “I finally sorted out my own will and paperwork last month, and it made me realize we've never talked about yours.”
- Names three that tend to backfire — the holiday-table version, the one about the house and the money, and “before anything happens to you” — with what the listener hears instead of what you meant.
- Carries all twelve of Sitting One's questions in plain spoken words, covering the signed will, the professional who helped make it, the papers, and how anyone would get into the home in an emergency.
- Gives each question its why, roughly how long to allow, whether a family would need the answer within seventy-two hours, and what would make it findable.
- Shows one invented family's Sitting One already filled in, so you can see a worked page before you try your own — then gives you the same rows blank, with tick boxes.
- Never asks you to write down a secret. The safe-and-lockbox question says it outright: record who holds the combination, because the code itself belongs with them, not on the page.
- Says plainly what it does not do: it never tells you which document to obtain, and it flags that document names and requirements vary by country and by state or province.
- PDF, US Letter — read it on screen or print it. Nothing to sign up for, nothing saved anywhere but your own copy.
Related reading
- Talking to Your Parents About Their Will The longer tutorial on raising it with a parent, start to finish.
- What is a Letter of Instruction? The page that says where everything is — what it covers, and what it cannot do.
- What is an Advance Directive? How medical wishes get recorded, and who a directive speaks to.
- The Driving Conversation Script A free script for raising driving with an aging parent, replies included.
- Templates for Caregivers A curated set of spreadsheets, binders and scripts for looking after someone.
Own it, don't rent it
Want the other three sittings?
This is Sitting One of four. The full playbook adds the other three sittings — the money and the obligations, the care and the medical wishes, and the practical and the sentimental — for 48 questions in all, plus the chapters on what to do when a parent shuts the subject down and how to handle the siblings, a computed two-hour version for a family that gets one weekend, the arithmetic for which sitting to run first, a ledger that prints every item's weight so you can run it on your own family, and a jurisdiction-neutral reference to the eight jobs a signed will does not do. Four PDFs, 97 pages.
A one-time purchase you keep — files that sit on your drive rather than a page you have to find again, and that still work in five years when something has changed.
General guidance for a family conversation — not legal, medical, tax, or financial advice, and not a substitute for any of them. It is not a will, a directive, or any other instrument, and it does not make, witness, register or validate any document. It prepares a family for the professional conversations rather than replacing them, and it never tells you which document to obtain. Document names, formalities and legal effects vary by country and by state or province; where a function is described, find the local equivalent and take professional advice before signing anything. The family in the worked example is invented for illustration. Write down where a thing is kept and who holds it — never a password, PIN, account number, door or alarm code, or safe combination. Free to use; please don't resell or redistribute.