Guide

Leave It Small: Setting Up Your Own Estate So Your Family Skips Court

Everything this site teaches a grieving family to untangle can be pre-untangled by the living, in an afternoon, for free. This page is for the person who never wants their kids to need this checker.

If you have just settled someone else's estate, you know the bill — in time, in court fees, in the afternoon your daughter will spend at a bank counter. Almost all of it was optional. An estate stays small on paper when its assets are titled to pass on their own:

• Name beneficiaries on everything that allows it. Bank accounts (payable-on-death), retirement accounts, life insurance, investment accounts (transfer-on-death). Review them after every marriage, divorce, birth, and death in the family — the form beats the will, every time.
• Record a transfer-on-death deed for the house if your state allows one (about thirty states and DC do). It costs a recording fee and removes the largest asset from probate entirely.
• Title vehicles with an eye to the transfer. Many states let a surviving spouse or heir transfer a title with a simple form or the small-estate affidavit — joint title or a TOD registration where offered makes it simpler still.
• Keep a map, not a mystery. A one-page list — accounts, institutions, insurance, deeds, where the will lives — kept somewhere your family can actually find. The most loving document in most estates is an index.
• Say who gets the password-manager emergency access. Not the passwords — the path to them. Locations and access, arranged while you can still answer questions.

For the solo side of this — the person who lives alone and needs the whole of their life findable by one trusted person if they cannot speak — our sister site IfICantSpeak was built for exactly that, with a free 48-hour readiness test. This site is the after; that one is the before. Families who use both rarely meet a probate judge.

And if you are reading this in the middle of settling someone else's estate: none of this page is a reproach. Almost nobody is taught it. You are learning it the hard way so that your own family won't have to.

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