We have information on Wills or Wills & Trusts that have been registered at LocateMyWill.com. If you aunt registered her Will here, we can help; if she did not, we cannot. But how do you know if she registered her Will with us or if she did not? Our clients receive two different passwords when they sign up, the Account password that gives them full access to add and edit their information and upload their important documents (such as their Will), and a second "Read-Only" password, that they can give to their trusted heirs, and which will allow those heirs limited "Read-Only" access to the client's site. There they will see everything the client entered for his or her heirs to see, but the heir's access will only allow them to view, but not change, the client's information and documents. So, clearly, if you have been given a password by the client, you know that the client has an account here. But what if you don't have a password? Then, maybe another relative, such as one or more of your Aunt's children, was given a password by her. But that's not the end of the inquiry. When you click on the button on our Home Page, "How Do I Check on a Registered Will?," you'll be taken to a page where you can type in your Aunt's name and her address. If you type it in exactly as your Aunt typed it in, you'll find out (1) where her Will is to be found and (2) the date of the latest (current) version. But you must type it exactly as your aunt typed it when she entered her information. So if her name is Margaret but she typed in Marge or Peggy, you'll have to keep trying until you hit on the name as she typed it. Same thing with the address: If her street is Broadway, but she typed B'way, you'll have to keep trying until you hit on the name as she typed it. (Of course, if she didn't have an account here, you'll never get through this step as we have no information.) If you Aunt registered her Will here, and you correctly enter her name and address information, you'll get the answer to your question, as stated above, i.e., (1) where her Will is to be found and (2) the date of the latest (current) version. But you will need to have her password to get to see the information she posted and the documents she uploaded. Without the password, you cannot gain access to her information. But some of our clients may not want their relatives to view their information while they are still alive and kicking. This is private information and they may wish to keep it that way. In that case, the client may attach the "Read Only" password to their Will, so that when the Will is located, the relatives will be able to use the password to access her information. So let's see how this works: Your Aunt has passed and no one in the family has been given a password. That may be because she doesn't have an account here, in which case we're of no further help. But if she did have an account and no one has the password, you can follow the steps above to learn where her Will can be located. Perhaps it's with Smith & Jones, Lawyers, or perhaps it's taped to the back of the top drawer in her bedroom. Either way, she may have written the password on the Will, and once you have the password, you can then view her information.

If you have a valid password, the process is very simple: Just go to the Login button on our Home Page, and choose 'Login as Heir.' You will be taken to a Login Page where you will enter (1) your name, (2) your mom's email address, and (3) the password she gave you, and you will have immediate 'Read-Only' access to her information and her uploaded documents. But what if your mom had several emails, and you can't get through? Then you can enter through a second method: This method requires you to click on the 'How Do I Check on a Registered Will' button on our Home Page and type in your mom's exact name and address. (This process is described in detail in the FAQ: 'My aunt recently died. How do I get to see if she had a Will?') Upon typing in her name and address exactly as she typed them when she set up the account, you will be taken to a page on which you can enter the password you were given. Password holders will only use this second method when they have trouble with the Account holder's email address.

If you don't want your "Read-Only" password holders to see your Will before it's time, then simply do not upload it. But be certain you state where it can be located (i.e., "It's held by Smith & Jones, Lawyers," or "It's in the top drawer of my filing cabinet in a folder with "My Will" written on the tab.") You are entirely free to answer some or all of our questions and to upload only those documents you choose to upload.

If you really don't want any of your relatives to be able to view your account while you're alive, then you should not provide anyone with your "Read-Only" password. Instead, write the "Read-Only" password on your Will, or have your lawyer attach the "Read-Only" password to the copy of your Will at the law firm. That way, when your Will is seen after your death, your heirs will also obtain the "Read-Only" password so that they can access your information. But if you have several copies of your Will in different places, try to write this information on every copy, but at the very least, place it on the copy at the location you identified on our site as your Will's location.

No. You either have the password or you don’t. We don’t know you and we are not going to investigate if you are who you say you are or if you rightfully should have access to the site. So we will not provide you with the password. Sorry. If you wish, you can go to court and get a judge’s order, which we will honor. It will be up to you to appear before the judge, prove your identify to him or her and demonstrate good cause for the judge to rule in your favor. But without a court order, we’re not handing out any passwords.

Do not confuse your two passwords. You have a password to your Account information. You have another “Read-Only” password to allow others to view your secure storage database. In the Account information you provide us with your name and profile, set up and change your passwords, and fill in the information which will appear in your database. Do NOT ever give anyone your Account password. Anyone with your Account password can change anything or everything in your database and storage. But you may give your "Read-Only" password to trusted relatives (or you may write the password on your Will so that it will only become known to your heirs when the Will is located). If you gave someone your "Read-Only" password and you now wish to revoke that authority, simply go to your Account information and change the "Read-Only" password. Make sure that those whom you wish to have access are given the new password.

No. Your Will is a legal document, duly signed in the presence of witnesses. It cannot be changed with a side-note. You will need to re-do your Will, and then update the information you have posted on LocateMyWill.com. However, as a practical matter, you can leave comments and wishes for your family, and they are generally free to follow them if they all agree to do so.

Absolutely. While there are very substantial differences between a Will and a Trust, they both have the same purpose, which is to make known how you wish for your estate to be distributed upon your death. Wills and Trusts are indistinguishable on this site. All references to Wills are just as valid when applied to Trusts.

Absolutely. If you don’t have a Will or Trust, your property will be distributed according to the laws of “intestacy” in your state. What this means is that the state effectively writes a Will for you and determines how your estate should be distributed to your heirs. Many people don’t have Wills. Some are happy with the distribution provided under the intestacy laws. Others just think their estate is too small to warrant a Will. We’re not here to tell you if you should have a Will or not. That is up to you, and if you wish you can seek legal counsel on that subject. But everything else about this website works for you. You still will want to tell your family what your final wishes are, who owes you money, who you pay the rent to and when it is due and the amount of the security deposit, where you have a bank account and a safety deposit box, who you’d like to get some special items, who should take care of Fido, who gets the urn or where the ashes should be scattered, etc. There are literally hundreds of questions that your relatives would like to ask, and frankly none of them would be answered in your Will even if you had one.

If a client fails to renew, we will eventually delete his or her information. But we will provide several months’ grace. Then, if you’re still around and wish to renew, so long as your account is still up, we will renew it based on the date it should have been renewed. But after a few months without a renewal, the account will be deleted, and at that point, if you wish to rejoin, it will be a new membership. Since the new membership is $25 and the renewal is $10, there’s only a $15 difference, but you will have to re-answer all the questions and reload your documents.

If you cannot get in, you do not have the right password. Maybe your uncle made a mistake when providing it to you, maybe you wrote it wrong, maybe he changed the password after giving it to you. But in any case, if the password does not work, we’re not going to provide you with the right password. We don’t know who you are and we’re not going to investigate.

We will allow you one week to cancel for a full refund. (For instance, If you signed up on a Monday, you will be allowed to cancel before the end of the following Sunday. After one week's time, cancellations cannot be processed.) You bought a year’s worth of service and we will give you a year’s worth of service. At most, you’re out $25, because we charge so very little for our service. You may keep the info you uploaded on our server, or you may delete everything. In any case, we don’t know what you have placed in your database/secure storage. At the end of the year, and after the grace period, we will delete all accounts that are not renewed..

Some people have three middle names. Some people have “Sr.” or “Jr.” or “III” after their last name. Some people use nicknames such as Bob, while their real name is Robert; or Peggy, while their real name is Margaret. At the time a client signs up for service, they provide us with their name in the form that they want others to enter it to locate them. It is up to Peggy to decide whether to call herself Peggy or Peg or Margaret. It is up to Liz to decide if she wants people to enter Liz or Beth or Elizabeth. How they filled in the form is how you must search for them. You do have unlimited tries, however, so you can keep trying until you hit the one they submitted. Similarly, if their address was submitted as “123 Main St., Apt. 2-B,” then that is what you must type in. It may take a few tries if they chose to use their three middle names, but if you really know them you likely know their full names. On the other hand, if they did not have an account with us, you’ll just keep getting the message that they can’t be located given the information you submitted.

If you don’t know who he is, then you may have no business knowing anything further. We specifically limit the info as to who has the Will, or where it can be found, as a security measure. If the client says that “Aunt Sally has the Will,” and you don’t know who Aunt Sally is, we don’t think you should be learning anything further from our site. The one exception is when a lawyer holds the Will. We will provide the lawyer’s name, address, and phone number. We expect that the lawyer will do the proper due diligence to determine whether you are an appropriate heir.

This can happen only if your Aunt failed to keep her information current. One of the reasons we charge a $10 renewal each year and don’t allow auto-renewals is so our clients will have to visit our site at least once a year and should review their data and make sure everything is up to date. But if a client fails to update their information, there is nothing we can do for you on this score. There is no work-around. People need to keep their information current.

We do not compete with lawyers. We do not write Wills or Trusts. We do not review them to determine if they are suitable or properly executed. In short, we do not practice law on this site and we do not provide legal advice. Your firm will hold a copy of your client’s Will for many, many years. Your client might live on for another thirty or forty years. Your firm will still have the Will, though it will be in a Banker’s Box in archival storage by then. But who will know to contact your firm? You may be long retired, and they might not know your name, nor would they remember it even if they had once known it. Your firm may have merged or been reformed several times and now has a different name, and it may have moved two or three times. You’ll be paid the statutory fee for handing the estate, but only if someone contacts you. They won’t know, after all these years, to contact you. But if your firm is listed as the contact at LocateMyWill.com, you’ll get a call from a relative and you’ll be able to retrieve the Will from deep storage and reopen the account. Likely, when you get the call from a relative who found your name on the LocateMyWill.com website, this may be your first (and only) knowledge that your client has passed

Your Account at LocateMyWill.com comes with 10 MB (megabytes) of free data storage for your uploaded documents. Our upgrade plan comes with 25MB of storage. How many documents will 10 MB hold? A 100-page document in Microsoft Word is about 376KB (kilobytes) in plain text format. The same text document with formatting expends to 872KB. One megabyte is 1,000 times bigger than one kilobyte, and we are giving each Account 10 MB, so theoretically you could place about 1,150 formatted Microsoft Word pages in your 10 MB. But of course, just how many of your pages will fit in your 10MB is unknown to us because some pages are filled with text, while others are half empty or double spaced. Per pc.net: "This means it will take about 500 pages of text to equal one megabyte. If a page has 4,000 characters (single-spaced), then it will take about 250 pages of text to equal one megabyte." Without getting too complicated, the point is you can fit a lot of text pages in 10 MB. The problem comes with photographs. Photographs are different sizes, and they are taken with different resolutions. Digital cameras today can take pictures at 5MP (megapixels), 8MP, 10MP, 12MP, and some of the better ones can take photos at 24MP. These larger resolutions can use us a lot of storage space. Digital photos in .jpg format can run from 20KB for a low quality image to 2MB for a high quality image. But at higher resolutions photos can use a lot more file space. For instance, a photograph shot at 18MP can vary in file size from 4 MB to 11 MB depending on the amount of color in the image and the amount of light (brightness). Certainly, if you try to upload such large photographs you’ll run out of space. But the good news is that you can “resample” a large image down to a much smaller size that would be between 100 KB (0.1MB) and 500KB (0.5MB). If you either shoot your photos at smaller resolutions or reduce (“resample”) the size of your photographs, you can fit a lot of them in 10 MB. Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) files come somewhere in between text files and photograph files. Some .pdf’s are created directly from your application (i.e., you have written a text document in Word and you choose to save it as a .pdf), while others are simply scanned (i.e., the scanner takes a picture of the printed page and saves the picture image as a .pdf). So the size of the .pdf file depends on how it was created. But even in the first case, a .pdf file can be larger than expected if one or more fonts are embedded into the PDF document. When .pdf’s are created using photographs (such as scanned images), the size will depend on the resolution of the photograph, and whether the photo is in color (or monochrome or grayscale). But if you save your .pdf files as “Reduced Size PDF,” you can substantially reduce their file size. Our site is designed to hold several of your important documents, some letters, and a few photographs. You can easily (and usually) fit such files in the 10MB allocated to each account. But if you want or need more space, you can purchase an additional 10MB for $10 per year and double your secure, encrypted storage. As for video, at 480p (SD) each minute uses 2 MB, and at 720p (HD) each minute uses 5 MB. When you get up to 1080p, each minute uses 20 MB, and at 4K each minute uses 84MB. So, if you are making a video for this site, use 480p or 720p, or upload your video to Youtube, gave it the privacy setting of "unsearchable", and place the video's URL in your private information on LocateMyWill.com

Every Account on LocateMyWill.com is given 10MB (megabytes) of storage space or 25 MB on the Upgrade Plan, where users can upload significant papers (such as their Wills or Trusts, Deeds, Marriage Certificates (or maybe Divorce Orders), Nationalization papers, Birth Certificates, Diplomas, Professional Licenses, etc.) as well as any letters they wish to leave, and a few photographs. All of these files should easily fit into the 10MB that comes with your Account. See our FAQ: “How many documents can you upload to your secure, encrypted storage?” But what if you need or want more space? Perhaps you have more papers than most people, or you want to upload more photographs. Not a problem. You can always buy another 10MB of storage space for $10 per year. All your documents will be stored in encrypted files for your protection. Any additional MB’s you buy will have the same renewal date as your account. That means that if you buy an additional 10 MB’s for $10 at the time you open your account or upon renewal you will get a full year. If you buy additional MB's mid-way through your account year, you’ll only get six months. Sorry, we can’t have separate renewal dates for your account and your additional memory, and we are not able to handle prorations. But in this example, the difference is only $5.00. Our storage availability is designed for those special papers and photographs that you would like your heirs to have when you’re gone. We are not a place to store a backup copy of your entire computer, or a place to share documents with colleagues. Frankly, other services are far less expensive on a per megabyte basis, but more expensive because they will require you to buy, as their smallest offering, a much larger storage area. Dropbox, for instance, at the time of this writing, will sell you 2 TB (terabytes) of storage for $119.88 a year. Another service, Wasabi, will sell you 1 GB for $71.88 a year. These are both excellent services, and they offer excellent value. If you need massive file storage, they offer a more economical price on a per MB basis. But most likely, you did not come to LocateMyWill.com to backup your entire computer. So for only an additional $10 per year you can get what you need, effectively doubling the storage space we provide to each standard Account. You can, of course, buy an additional 20MB for $20 a year, or 30MB for $30 a year, etc. Start off with us without buying extra storage. You will likely find that the 10MB that comes standard with each Account (or the 25 MB that comes with our Upgrade Plan) will fulfill your needs. If and when you fill 70% of your allocated storage you will get a notification on screen that you are filling up your space, and you will be able to decide whether to buy additional storage or not. It’s your choice, and at an additional $10 per year for an additional 10MB, it’s not too expensive. Here’s an idea if you’d like to post videos in high resolution without going to the expense of purchasing extra memory from us: You can always post your video as “unsearchable” on youtube and then place the youtube video address (the URL) in your Questionnaire answers, or type the URL and a description of the video on a new document and upload that document with your other uploaded files on LocateMyWill.com.