Why I built When I Am Gone

Before I built When I Am Gone, I spent years working as an attorney in estate administration. I sat across the table from surviving spouses, adult children, and executors who were trying to navigate a process they had never asked to be part of, at a time when the last thing they wanted to think about was paperwork.

What I saw, again and again, was not negligence. The people whose estates I helped administer were not careless. Many of them had wills. Some had spoken to their families. But when the time came, the estate was still not ready - and the family paid the price.

The most common problem was liquidity. A deceased estate must meet its liabilities before anything can be distributed, and if the assets are tied up in property or a business, the executor and the family can wait months - sometimes years - for the estate to generate the cash it needs. Surviving spouses who depended on a joint income would find themselves in real financial difficulty during that period, through no fault of anyone.

The second problem was disorganisation. Policies that no one knew existed. Bank accounts at institutions the family had never heard of. A will drafted fifteen years ago that did not reflect anything about the life the deceased had actually lived. A safe that no one could open because the combination was inside it.

I would sit across from a grieving spouse and explain that we could not yet apply for Letters of Executorship because we had not located the original will. Or that the estate would need to advertise for creditors before we could even begin to distribute. And I would watch them absorb that information while they were still absorbing the fact that their partner was gone.

Over time, I became convinced that a great deal of this hardship was preventable. Not all of it - estate administration is inherently complex and some delays are unavoidable. But the specific pain caused by missing documents, undisclosed accounts, unreviewed wills, and estates with no liquidity plan? That is addressable. People just need a prompt and a place to act on it.

When I Am Gone is my attempt to provide both. It is a secure place where you can organise your documents, record your accounts and policies, keep your will current, and - critically - think through whether your estate will have enough liquidity to look after the people you love without putting them under financial pressure while they are grieving.

I did not build this to replace attorneys. Estate administration requires professional advice, and I would encourage everyone to work with a qualified attorney when drafting or reviewing their will and when thinking through their estate plan. What When I Am Gone does is make sure that by the time your family sits across the table from an attorney, the groundwork is already done.

I want the families we serve to be able to grieve without also being administrators. I want surviving spouses to spend the first months after a loss focused on themselves and their children, not on locating documents or managing creditors. That is the version of things I kept wishing for, sitting across that table. This platform is my attempt to make it real.