About

About ClearLegacyGuide

Most of us were never taught how to hand our important details to the people we love. We learned it the hard way — usually in a week when nobody had the energy to learn anything.

ClearLegacyGuide exists to make that handover boring. Plain English, short steps, and printable pages you can finish at the kitchen table.

Who writes this

I'm Jason Su. I write software for a living, and I build and maintain everything on this site myself: the guides, the printable checklists, the interactive checklist tool, and the code the site runs on.

I am not a lawyer, a physician, or a financial adviser. This site does not give legal, medical, or tax advice, and it never will — you will see that stated on every page, not buried in a footer. If your question turns on what the law requires in your situation, the honest answer is that you need a licensed professional in your state, and no website can substitute for that.

What I can do well is something different. The information people need already exists — it is just badly organised. Your state publishes a form but calls it something you would never have searched for. Your bank has a process you only discover by telephone. And almost every article on the subject assumes you already speak the vocabulary.

Why the tools are built the way they are

The usual way to get help with this is to hand your details to a website: create an account, upload your documents, let a company store your account numbers. Asking someone to do that on a site they found ten minutes ago is a big ask, and refusing is entirely reasonable.

So this site works the opposite way. The checklist tool runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you type is uploaded, stored, or seen by anyone — including me. The printables are free, unwatermarked, and formatted for US Letter paper so they print correctly on the first try. And every legal or medical claim links to the official source, so you can check it rather than take my word for it.

How this site is researched

• Official sources only. State agencies, state bars, and federal agencies. Not template farms, not a blog that copied another blog. If we cannot find an official source for a claim, the claim does not go on the site.
• We never write legal documents. We link the form your state publishes. We do not draft wills, directives, or powers of attorney, and we do not tell you what to put in them. That is work for a licensed professional in your state.
• Every state page carries a date. Government pages move and forms get revised. Each state page shows the date we last confirmed the link so you can judge how much to trust it.
• When we do not know, we say so. Witness and notary rules differ from state to state and from form to form. We deliberately do not summarise them. Instead we tell you to follow the form in front of you — including over anything written here.

What this site will never do

• Sell your personal information.
• Ask you to upload your passwords, account numbers, or documents.
• Pretend to be a law firm. We are not one, and nothing here is legal advice.
• Put a subscription in front of a checklist that should be free.
• Publish a page and never revisit it.

How this site is paid for

ClearLegacyGuide is reader-supported. We display advertisements, and some links may earn us a commission at no extra cost to you. That is the entire business model — there is no product to upsell and no subscription waiting behind the free downloads.

Advertising never decides what we write or what we recommend. Some of the most useful pages here have no commercial value at all, and they exist because people need them. See our full disclosure.

Corrections

Being wrong here has real consequences for real families, so corrections are welcome and taken seriously. If a form has changed, a link is dead, or a page describes your state incorrectly, please tell us. Pages that have been corrected are updated with a new review date.

Contact

Questions, corrections, or something you wish we covered? Get in touch — everything is read.

Last reviewed September 17, 2026.