An Easier and More Personal Approach to Family History

Have you ever stopped to wonder, “What is going to happen to all my ‘stuff’ one day when I’m gone?” We’re going to hedge our bets and say probably not. Given that only 32% of us even have a will or estate plan, the finer details of all that ‘stuff’—cherished mementos, valuable collections, travel keepsakes, old photos and more—are often overlooked. But that’s the crux of the problem. Our ‘stuff’ becomes the proverbial elephant in the room, and someone, somewhere is going to have to deal with it one day.  

Our co-founder Heather discovered this the hard way when her mother passed away unexpectedly seven years ago. Heather had all her ‘stuff,’ but what she didn’t have, or even know, was what on Earth would her mother have wanted to happen with all that ‘stuff.’ Donate? Sell? Keep in the family? Bequeath? Her mother was the only one with the answers, and sadly, her mother was no longer there. 

For those of you who are new to Artifcts, and may not know our founding story, this is what led Heather to partner with Ellen to create the platform that you see today.  

We all have stories, we all have ‘stuff,’ and chances are our ‘stuff’ is going to outlive us one day. We should learn from the best of the best - museums! Just look at your favorite museum—it likely has more ‘stuff’ than you can imagine, safely enclosed in glass display cases, with descriptions, dates, and the like to help tell the story and give it context. 

Today’s ARTIcles story though is not about death, dying, or even museums. No, it’s about our ‘stuff,’ the items we love—the things that make us smile, the mementos we keep reminding ourselves of good times—and how to use Artifcts in your estate planning to ensure that all our ‘stuff’ doesn’t end up in an unwanted pile somewhere, or worse yet, in a landfill. Bad for our legacies, and bad for the environment.   

Estate Planning of Things 

Years back we published an ARTIcles story titled, The Estate Planning of Things. The premise was simple—use Artifcts to populate your tangible assets memorandum (that’s a fancy way of saying a list-of-stuff-who-gets-it-next-and-why).  

Over the years we’ve gotten questions from estate planners, executors, and families on how to do just that. We get it! Estate planning and thinking about our own mortality is a stressful, no-fun way to spend a weekend. But avoiding a protracted probate process and lessening the grief and cost to your loved ones may be just the motivation you need. 

Let’s dive into the nitty gritty details of how to use Artifcts to ensure you and your family, friends, or executor have a roadmap of what happens next to all your ‘stuff.’ Why you may ask? Because we’ve yet to meet an Artifcts member who has said, “It’s okay, all of my ‘stuff’ can go to a landfill when I’m gone.” Our ‘stuff’ and stories matter.   

Five Easy Steps to Estate Planning with Artifcts 

1. 1. 1. Pick an item you want to Artifct. It sounds obvious, but sometimes that is the hardest part. You may choose something financially valuable or something that has a lot of “heat value.” There is no wrong way to start.  
      2. Add a short or long story, and any important details you want to include with the Artifct. If you get stuck, we have an entire list of questions that may help you get started! We strongly encourage you to always include the why, as in, why is this item important or valuable to you?
      3. Attach documentation. This is especially important for financially valuable items. If you’re working with an attorney or an estate planner, they may specifically ask you to attach receipts, valuations, appraisal reports, and the like to document the provenance and current market value for gifting and tax purposes.  
      4. Fill out the “In the Future” field. This step is critical as it creates the roadmap for your family of what happens next for each item you Artifct. 
          
         Click the image to view our ArtiTips video!
      5. Click save! Congratulations, your Artifct is now ready to be privately shared with your attorney or exported to your estate planner. You can easily export your entire Artifct collection, a single Artifct, or any combination of Artifcts. Some members even opt to send their estate planners their Artifct QR code to incorporate into their tangible asset memorandum.  

Details to Consider When you Artifct for Estate Planning 

As the title of this ARTIcles story suggests, Artifcting is an art. And we’ve learned a lot about the ins and outs when it comes to Artifcts to support your future plans. Here are our top tips: 

Want to avoid conflict among your heirs? If you suspect sentimental or valuable items you own will become a source of conflict, provide your reasoning for why a certain item will go to one person and not the other down the road. Doing so may help assuage the concerns and sadness of those left behind.

Do not send your loved ones on a scavenger hunt looking for items you no longer own. That means using that "location" field in your Artifct if you do still own it and indicating "Too late, enjoy the memory" in the 'In the Future' field if you have parted with it already. And if you have parted with it, be sure to update your tangible assets memorandum, too!  

While you're at it, fill out your Legacy Contacts for your Artifcts account, because we think your Artifcts are valuable and in estate planning, you need to also account for your digital assets. At Artifcts, you can choose primary and secondary Legacy Contacts, ensuring the time and effort you put into creating your Artifcts are never for naught. Your Legacy Contact(s) will be able to access your Artifcts after you are gone (although they won’t be able to edit the details; your Artifcts, your voice!) 

Simply go to Account Settings >> Manage My Profile >> Security and Longevity and click “Preserve My Artifcts.” Your future heirs will thank you.  

Have additional tips when it comes to Artifcts and estate planning? We’d love to hear from you! You can reach us at editor@artifcts.com. 

###

Estate planning on your mind? You might also be interested in these ARTIcles: 

Gift Your Loved Ones a Why

Your Future Family Heirlooms

Insurance & The Art of Artifcts

A Family History in Five Artifcts

© 2025 Artifcts, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

We’ve all heard the saying, “A man’s home is his castle,” but is that really the case? In my experience, our home has long been the domain of my wife, children, and four-legged family members.  

My wife has a simple, Scandinavian inspired home aesthetic honed after her time living in Denmark. My children tend to embrace the “leave-it-where-you-left-it-until-you-have-to-move-it” approach to home decorating, or rather cluttering. And where or what exactly does that leave me in the equation? I get my home office. The one room in our house that is unequivocally, unabashedly 100 percent me. My stuff, my stories, my memories, and yes, even my clutter, although it’s not clutter to me. It’s my stuff, and I love it.  

Shelves, Shelves, and More Shelves! 

When I say I love my shelves, what I’m really saying is that I love the items that are displayed on my shelves, and coincidentally behind me during every one of my Zoom calls. Three shelves and as many decades (if not more!) of stuff that tells my story and highlights the places I’ve been and the things I’ve done.  

Let’s start with my technology shelf. Yes, I am a geek at heart, having been an electrical engineering student at Virginia Tech back in the day. As we used to say, you can’t spell “geek” without a double “EE.” I have a shelf dedicated to all the tech 'stuff' I have used over the years—my original 1992 Motorola flip phone, a Walkman (remember those?), a few Gameboys, a GPS tracker, and one of my most prized possessions, a Microvision Blockbuster gaming device. Our youngest stares wide eyed at this shelf wondering how on Earth we used to function “back in the day” absent smart phones, tablets, and the like. The older kids however love the shelf and always have a “remember when” story to go with the less ancient ‘stuff.’ 

I have a shelf dedicated to my more active flying days, when I had my own plane. (That however is a much longer story for another day, although I did document it in Artifcts for safe keeping!) 

I also have a shelf (and a windowsill!) dedicated to the places I’ve been and the mementos I’ve picked up along the way. Incense burners from my time in India, and sound bowls from Kathmandu. 

You can tell a lot about me by what’s on my shelves. And although my shelves may look cluttered to some and I have occasionally heard on Zoom calls, “wow, you have a lot of stuff,” I know what each and every item is and, more importantly, my family knows why I have the stuff that I have and what it means to me. What do your shelves say about you? 

What Good is an Office Without Books? 

Another corner of my office is dedicated to my book collection. As my wife likes to note, I was never much of a reader until I met her; she introduced me to the joy of reading and now I have a bookshelf that is a literal time capsule of the years we’ve been together.  

There are travel books for the places we’ve been, and biographies and autobiographies of the events we’ve attended and the notables we’ve seen speak. There’s also a healthy dose of fiction and non-fiction. I haven’t gotten around to Artifcting all my books yet, and I may not at the rate I’m going, but I have Artifcted the ones that mean the most to me. The ones I want my kids to know mattered to me and why. You can check out some of my favorites, including The Unwinding of the Miracle by Julie Yip Williams in my most Influential Books Artifct.   

And Don’t Forget the Walls! 

Some of my favorite ‘stuff’ doesn’t fit neatly on the shelf—a tapestry from my travels in southeast Asia, framed concert posters, and even children’s artwork. If the walls could talk, my office walls would continue to tell my story.

One of my favorite framed moments? My business card from the first company I founded. It’s a long story and a private Artifct, but having that card framed and readily viewable to all who enter my office is really important to me. It reminds me of my father, and my desire to make him proud of me given all the sacrifices he and my mother made for us growing up. It’s a testament to hard work and determination, and a reminder to all my children that anything is possible if you put your mind to it. 

Yes, I really do love my ‘stuff.’ And although I may not have much say over what the rest of the house looks like most days, my office is my castle, my domain, and the ‘stuff’ in my office is much more than ‘stuff.’ It’s my story, my memories.

I hope this piece has inspired you to tackle your office and add to your story, one object at a time. Oh, and once you Artifct your stuff, check out the timeline view where you can visualize your life and why you’re wired like you are! 

###

You can also read previous ARTIcles Matt has written, including Father, World Traveler and Now Downsizer and Stuck In the Middle With Stuff. 

© 2025 Artifcts, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Reading time: 4 minutes 

Paper clutter and digital clutter can transform minor nuisances to major problems when you have a critical need for access to your important life documents. Today we want to flag the evolution well underway to declutter and organize all of life’s essential information via what’s commonly referred to as digital vaults. 

Bottomline: These modern tools can help you and your loved ones to get organized and be better prepared. 

How many email, banking, shopping, entertainment streaming, and even cloud storage sites are you using? Apps exist to help you keep track of paid memberships to ensure you remember to resubscribe or cancel, helping you keep an eye on costs and control the chaos. Check out this story from US News: Money for information on a few. 

And what about true life essentials, like the paper copies we keep of everything from warranties, tax filings, and receipts to insurance policies and mortgage documents. Sometimes we keep these because we aren’t certain where the digital version exists or if a paper copy is somehow legally required. We may even have digital duplicates floating around in our email accounts. 

Digital vaults can manage it all, your car title, mortgage information, passport and drivers license, and banking and investment details as well as life’s daily resources (memberships, online accounts, contact lists, and more) to be better prepared for everyday life, the aftermath of natural calamities, and deaths in the family. Vaults have a different scope than home inventory apps, the latter focusing on the tangible stuff. And vaults offer more features than file storage, like Box, Dropbox, or Google Drive, where you can nearly endlessly amass files without rhyme or reason.

The Early Days of Digital Vaults

Some of the first companies in this space emerged following the 2011 tsunami in Japan, others have steadily followed.  

At stake is everything we rely on to make our lives function. And when major calamities strike, we may lose access to important documents, including insurance policies, property deeds, and more, without which a return to any sort of normal is impaired and/or prolonged. A digital solution was needed to help people through these life altering events with less stress, cost, and loss. 

Why go digital? Because files in a cabinet or box are vulnerable. Period. Add to that the fact that more and more of our lives have gone digital, there’s no reason to create a paper trail for loss and misuse when robust and affordable digital options are now available to help us tackle it all securely. 

The Digital Vault Industry Today

The digital vault industry has emerged to not only securely store critical information but to also offer built-in planning tools. How’s that for efficient!  

Avoid getting distracted by bells and whistles, however. Review each vault’s listed features, and ask yourself: Does it meet my core needs? No one vault is exactly like another. Pick the one you’ll actually use and will work best as you work with financial services, insurance, estate planning and other professionals, too. At a minimum, as you review each vault consider: 

• • • Security of the system, how you will sign in and grant others access, and how any of your personal information is being used by AI tools to generate personalized recommendations. 
    • Export options if you terminate your subscription and want to take your assets back out. 
    • Adding new information, meaning is this a tedious manual endeavor or is there support from smart instant scanning and sorting (generally AI-assisted). 
    • Price for the trial period, annually, and lifetime plus any add-on features you “need.” If there is a free model, always try before you buy, and then upgrade if you like it and free is insufficient for your needs. 
    • Unique features. As we’ve said, no vault is exactly like the other and your needs are not identical to others’ either. Trustworthy Certified Experts™ offer customized 1:1 guidance whereas Motivity Care provides a suite of concierge care management services and GoodTrust is supporting estate planning. 
    • Ease of use, because beyond different features each offers, the vaults each look, feel, and organize your information a bit differently as is the ease with which you can securely share information with family and professionals. Don’t forget to test your vault out on the device you will use to get the work done, e.g. desktop computer, laptop, tablet, or phone.

Here are a few examples of digital vaults on our radar, each with an array of unique features, offerings, and specialties.

Artifct Here are a few examples of digital vaults on our radar, each with an array of unique features, offerings, and specialties.

(In alphabetical order; with company tagline.)

• • • Everplans: All the pieces of your world in one place. 
    • GoodTrust: Estate planning made easy, affordable, and secure. 
    • Keylu: Life is chaotic. Keylu brings order. 
    • Motivity Care: Redefining how you manage caregiving. 
    • Prisidio: Your digital vault. For life.™ 
    • Trustworthy: The Family Operating System®

You’ve Signed Up to a Digital Vault: Now What?

If you’ve taken the step to set up your data within a vault, be proactive to ensure your time and money are well spent. Here are a few tips to make the most of your digital vault from our personal experience: 

1. 1. 1. Block time to your calendar over the next few weeks to input your critical accounts, memberships etc.; if you have a filing cabinet or box, start by digitally migrating those contents. Email is another great source to migrate docs you’ve received. 
      2. Turn on any available options for reminders so you keep information updated and fill any gaps you might leave;  
      3. Add an annual refresh date on your personal calendar; of course, if you have a major life event (birth, death, sell a company, etc.), or you move, you should also update your vault information; and, 
      4. Set alerts in your search engine of choice, such as Google Alerts, for announcements from your vault company about events, new or retired features, and policy and price changes in case you miss an email or alert from the vault.
      5. Send feedback to your digital vault of choice. It only makes the product better (for you and for all) for companies to receive feedback. Screenshots and videos are amazing bonuses to include in your email to the company. Don't forget to mention what type of device you are working from (e.g., smartphone, tablet, desktop), if applicable.

With a digital vault, you’ll be better prepared for yourself and your loved ones. We hope you find one that fits your needs!

###

© 2025 Artifcts, Inc. All Rights Reserved.