The Best Laid Plans The past month, I have been thinking about death. Those 64,000 dead Americans aside, I've been specifically thinking about my own death. Even more specifically, what happens to all of my shit if I die? The question was posed by my daughter, who came home from college in March after it was shut down for corona virus. She wondered, quite reasonably, if she would be able to afford to finish college if I caught the virus and died. I took the question seriously, because life is fragil and unpredictable. I'm still a bit shaken after the death of an employee's wife who was murdered at an ATM machine. Though my daughter's question was said harmlessly and in jest, I was triggered, and it sent me tumbling down deep into the rabbit hole. I gathered all the dusty insurance policies and checked beneficiary info (thank goodness I did). Then for the first time, I actually read the several LLC operating agreements that I'm a party to. I created a simple living revocable trust to hold ownership of the LLC's, and named my wife successor trustee. It made me realize how lucky I am to have had a stable marriage. Many of my friends were not so lucky. I suppose there's still time for all of this to turn into a nightmare, but for now I'm optimistic. The hardest part about estate planning was writing a step-by-step manual detailing how to run the LLC's and how to get at the money. I gave suggestions for how to sell them, or shut them down, and which employees I think can operate them best. I told how and when to pay people, and how much. I put Amex and other credit cards on auto-pay. Advertising accounts, email accounts, banks, credit card processors, server hosting accounts, how to do quarterly IRS and state income tax and sales tax withholding. Name of bookkeeper, and accountant. And the name of the expensive lawyer I try to avoid as much as possible. Then I sat for an hour on the phone with my insurance guy, and let him upsell me to an expensive umbrella policy, as well as switching ownership of the adult kids cars into their names to reduce my financial exposure should they get into an accident. Its taken me nearly a month, and I still think its a mess. So many pieces of our lives have passwords and responsibilities that just drag on behind us until we die or forget about them. Lastly, and after a lot of thought and anguish, I took the first steps to begin trusting my wife with my Bitcoin private keys; my pride and joy, my precious. I have fretted about the private keys since 2012, and had occassionally have had dreams about dying with them and taking them with me. But I'm even more paranoid of having them stolen. So I have divided the key(s) into 3 (maybe 4) parts. One portion she won't be able to access until she takes control of the trust and can legally access a safe deposit box the trust controls. Another portion of the keys will be automatically sent to her by email 90 days after I fail to log into a certain online account. The final portion I'm not going to talk about, but it will appear about 30 days after I die, and I think it's pretty damn clever if I have to say so myself (and guess I do). Wish I could tell ya. I know... its only about $100 in Bitcoin, but it has always made me do strange things. Someday it might be worth $150. And so now I feel mostly ready to stare corona virus in the eye, except for the suffering part where the lungs fill up with fluid and you slowly asphyxiate. All I can do now is watch as it slowly surrounds me, engulfing the county. At the same time, I am growing weary of quarantine and ever more likely to do something stupid to carelessly expose myself to the virus. Its just a matter of time, I know. I have a bit of satisfaction from taking a bite out of my planning chore. And I sleep a little better know that things are mostly in order. So on the day the nurse enters my lonely hospital room and pulls the ventilator tube out of my cold body, I am quite certain that the entire experience of dying will have been just a little less annoying. -- Has corona virus made you do anything weird that you otherwise wouldn't have done? Me neither.