Death & Taxes: even if you don't need a will

It seems like it takes a major life event or great amount of wealth for most of us to write a will. Maybe because it solidifies mortality in our minds and that is scary or maybe, like me, you don't think you need one because you're young, single and fancy free.

This year, I decided to deep clean my house as a birthday gift to myself. A fresher start to a new year. As I was going through some keepsakes, I had things from my grandma who passed away a few years ago and I wondered how difficult it was for her kids to carry out her wishes. I don't know if she had a will or left specific instructions, but I do know there were decisions left to the family, requiring some awkwardness during a very difficult time.

I realized that I want to alleviate as much of that as I can for my family and it was neglectful for me not to have a will. Death of a loved one is hard enough, I didn't want anyone I care about to have to figure out what to do with my yarn collection too!

So, today I'd like to invite you to consider, if you don't have a will, to join me in this simple process I did. It only took about 15 minutes and it was a good first step to being more responsible to my loved ones, now and when I'm gone.

Start by sitting down and writing a letter to the person(s) who will most likely be in charge of things after you're gone. No mushy love stuff, no sentimentality. Just the facts. You can write the tear jerkers later!

The intention of this letter is to delegate the entire business of your life, so please keep it simple and unemotional.

Write down your thoughts and wishes about 

• donating your organs
• funeral arrangements 
• how much should they spend and what should they do with the flowers and cash gifts that arrive?
• which couch cushion you stash your mad money in
• any directions about your assets that you require
• do you have particular items to go to particular people?
• who's responsible for burning your diary and closing your facebook account?

If you're like me, you might include a disclaimer for them to do “this or whatever is easier for you” on parts that you really don't care about but are just letting them off the decision hook.  Permission to put off, delegate or ignore a task might be what they need more.

Then, consider what is left – what isn't on that list? Someone will have to handle that too, who will it be? What do you want them to do?

For example, what should they do with your clothes, dishes and pantry stock? No one thinks about that but believe me, when you're gone, someone is going to be standing there trying to decide who should get the cans of soup and those things hanging in your closet you never wore. You can make it easy by listing your favorite charities and instructions to donate or consider who might benefit from those things and gift them.

That's it! Just a nice list to make life easier for someone who will be deeply sad for losing you, in writing, so there's (hopefully) less drama and confusion.

Now, the caveat here is that laws may or may not uphold your will, there may be extenuating factors and people may even protest it. So, I'd recommend getting professional legal help to make it as official and binding as possible.

Finally, let your person(s) know where this document is and consider giving them copies. There doesn't have to be a conversation about it even – just that it's done.

Don't forget to review it and update periodically *put it on your calendar annually*.

Let me know how it goes. I know I sleep better at night now, I hope you and your loved ones will too.

What's your meaning of life?

I have a theory that we are all searching for the meaning of life and that is the meaning of life: the search. Connecting to something greater than yourself.  A lot of people try to find that meaning in collecting money, shoes or other people and I'm not here to judge their level of success, just to ask how that is working for them.

What is your meaning of life?  What are you trying to connect with and is it working?

I read an interesting take on life's meaning last week and have been pondering it quite a bit.  It went something like: we are not a body, we have a body.  We are a spirit and our body is simply a vehicle for communication so that we can have a human experience.  Further, that the body can't think, that it is our mind that interprets the sensations and gives them (sometimes arbitrary) meanings: good or bad.

What was really interesting to me was how differently everyone interprets the same sensations.  Two people can experience the exact same thing and interpret it very differently.  For example, a roller coaster.  One person can get in it and ride for hours, throwing their hands up and screaming with delight.  Another person can get in with fear in the pit of their stomach, clench the safety bar until their knuckles are bleeding and throw up from the excruciating horror of it, refusing to ever ride again.

There are even studies of infants 4 months old, showing how extremely different each can react to the exact same stimuli so we don't even know exactly when we start to form our perceptions of this world.  So, I'm not going to get into the psychology/biology of it.
What I wonder, is can we learn to change our perception and should we?

Personally, I think if something isn't working for you or you just want to make a positive change, the answer is yes on both counts.  We naturally look for evidence to "prove" our personal beliefs - just look at your friends' Facebook pages, you'll see they are filled with things that support their own view of how the world should be and you'll find exact opposite view points on a different person's page.

So, the challenge is to search out the perspective that supports the meaning you want to bring more of into your life.  You can focus on the good news or the bad news, change or the status quo - which one do you choose?

Being a cognitive miser

This week we were talking about how some of the most successful people live a surprisingly simple life and the various tactics we can adopt from them to also become more successful in our endeavors.

There is actually a lot of science behind why simplifying your life can actually bring you a lot more prosperity, satisfaction and happiness.  One theory is the "cognitive miser".  It has shown that we actually have a limited amount of decision making ability each day, called "decision fatigue". This is the reason that a lot of us can't decide what to have for dinner or lose our resolve to do certain things by the end of the day.  We have literally used up our ability to make decisions through out the day starting with what to wear before we leave for work and all the decisions that follow.

So, if we can minimize some of the simple decisions we have to make each day, imagine how many other opportunities to accomplish bigger things would open up.

You've probably heard of people who have precise morning routines that they rarely deviate from (likely you've heard of them because they are successful and doing an interview about a day in the life, like Tony Robbins, Ivanka Trump etc.).

I don't know about you, but when I hear about these routines I pretty much think it sounds impossible.  I mean, get up before dawn in the middle of winter to go to the gym, cook a big breakfast, read the papers, tie my shoes...ha ha ha.  But, when I feel myself hitting a wall in the evening where I'm looking at the fridge and can't figure out what to do but open a can of peas for dinner, things get ugly.

So, a few of us decided to see if we could change our lives for the better with these tactics and I'm here to report out so we might help you too!

It was harder than we thought!  For example, have you ever thought about the sheer insanity you face at the store?  There are thousands of choices in breakfast cereal,  dozens of types of eggs, don't get me started on the ice cream (seriously, if you want dairy free, sugar free, fat free ice cream maybe you should consider a trip to the produce section instead for a juicy peach), 5 scents of the same brand of bathroom cleaner, hundreds of types of toothpaste and then you have to consider that a lot of those "choices" are actually the very exact same thing from the same plant, off the same line into the same can with a different sticker on each.  We live in a society of unlimited choices for everything and to make matters worse a lot of us want to find the best "deal" in all those choices so we are comparing prices and endorsements to figure it all out. It's a lot of work just to get the supplies we need before we even get to the real work of life.

All that aside, we decided to focus on 3 things: encapsulating our work wardrobe, meal planning and play time (aka exercise).

Wardrobe:

Have you ever noticed that most working men have a uniform?  The same color suit/pants/jacket and maybe a couple color variation of shirts and shoes (which often go to after work and weekend events too)?  More women are adopting that concept as well but every one I know still wants fun accessories and require unique outfits for occasions.

Personally, I've had something of a "uniform" since I got my first job out of college and a wise colleague said she just wore "black pants and a top" everyday so she fit the dress code and didn't spend a lot of money on outfits that the same 10 people were going to see every day anyway.  She was brilliant and didn't even know about decision fatigue.  At the time, I had a love of fashion that led me to a full and vibrant closet but every morning I found myself spending half an hour trying things on until coming back to the 20% of my closet that was easy - the neutral colors and simple tailored lines.  Then, racing out the door.  It took me a couple years before I finally resigned myself to the fact that I did indeed have a uniform and I separated my closet to the work side and the fun side and saved myself that 30 minutes every day.

Meal Planning: 

The next part we tackled was food.  Gemma already had this one down pat to gift the rest of us.  Every morning she had the same bowl of muesli for breakfast with almond milk. Done.  She highly recommended that we each eat the same thing for breakfast every morning.  Our struggle was to decide what.
Jill needed to get 30 grams of protein in the morning so was often struggling between shakes, bars, eggs or a drive thru and trying to feed her kids at the same time (who each wanted something different). She was using a lot of decision making ability first thing in the morning and felt like this one would make the biggest difference in her life.  So, she settled on just having eggs every morning because it was also something her kids would eat without much of a fuss.
A couple weeks later, she reports that it has worked out well.  She thought cooking in the morning would take more time than cereal or a shake but she found they are actually gaining time by not having any discussion around it.  We gave her a gold star!

We also came up with systems for other meals (each night of the week has a theme and lunch is always leftovers).

Play time:

This seemed to be the thing that was hardest to routinize because in the morning was too hard with all the other activities to get out the door and by evening, well we all had used up our cognitive resources so it would end up on the list to definitely do tomorrow. Hmm.

One day I saw an interview with Tracy Anderson (personal trainer of Gwyneth and Madonna) where they asked her what exercises she would recommend for a lady who only had 15 minutes.  Her answer was shocking and real.  She said she would tell them to get out their calendar and figure out why they didn't have an hour to show up for their health every day.

I shared this immediately and we all agreed, we had to do whatever it took to show up for our health every day and got creative, plugging in our exercise when we still had will power left during the day to make it a habit.

We each put a non-negotiable appointment on our calendar no more than 6 hours after we woke up and chose a single workout to do for 40 days.  It might sound boring and go against the crowd who say you need to change up your workout so you don't plateau but that wasn't the point.  What we needed was a decision-less action to take every day to show up for our health.  Maybe after 40 days we can start changing it up, once the core habit is established.

Of course, we made these changes one at a time over the course of a few weeks but the results have been phenomenal.  We have each found more time in our days to do the things we really love and make strategic movement toward huge goals.

I hope that this will inspire or help you if you're also struggling with that feeling of not enough time in the day or running out of will power.  Let me know what your challenges are and I'll share some of our brainstorming with you to help!






The millionaire who lives in an Airstream trailer