A Funeral Director's 9 Reasons The Lamorial Planner Works When The One In Your Drawer Didn't
1. It starts where the first 48 hours actually start
In my work the order of things is not a preference, it is a sequence. Families come to me for the funeral, and within a day they need the phone, because the bank wants a code, the airline wants the booking, the photographs are on it.
Every planner I have read opens with the same thing: final wishes, then bank account details. That is the order the industry uses, not the order a family lives.
The Lamorial planner opens with the phone. The passcode, the backup codes, the app with the changing numbers. Page one, not page eighty.
2. It answers the question I'm asked more than any other
After twenty-one years, the most common question in my office is some version of "how do we get into her accounts." Not one account. The email, the iCloud, the subscriptions, the bank.
Apple will not open a device for us. Neither will Google. Nothing a funeral home sends them changes that.
The most important piece of information in this book is the passcode. The phone will not wait for it: Face ID stops working after roughly forty eight hours of inactivity, and ten wrong attempts can erase it permanently.
Write it down, and the phone stops being a locked door. What waits on the other side of it is a different problem, and the next one.
3. It accounts for the second door, which is where I watch families stop
I have sat beside enough daughters at enough kitchen tables to know exactly where this breaks once the phone itself is open. It is never the password. She has the password. She types it correctly, and the screen answers with something else instead: a reset link sent to an email account nobody has opened in years, or a six digit code waiting inside an authenticator app she has never seen before. Every planner I tested had a line for the password. Only this one had lines for what comes after it.
4. It is the only one that passed the test I run
Families leave things behind in my office, planners among them. Two years ago I started collecting them and testing them properly, in the situation they were written for.
Most of them are the same thing with different covers. Twenty or thirty pages of blank tables, printed cheaply, sold online for a few dollars with "Password Book" across the front. Nobody who has sat with a family in week one had any hand in making them.
Nine of the most popular. Eight stalled before I could reach a single account.
The Lamorial planner is different. 83 guided pages across nine sections. It finishes the test.
5. In 2011, a month of mail told you everything. Now nothing arrives.
Fifteen years ago, a family could find the whole shape of a life by opening the mail. Wait a few weeks and it all came to the door. Bank statements. Bills. The pension. The mortgage. Subscriptions nobody remembered signing up for.
None of that arrives now. Statements went paperless. Bills pay themselves. Whole accounts exist without ever announcing themselves on paper.
So the search that used to take one afternoon at a kitchen table cannot be done at all. There is nothing to sort through, and no way to know what is missing.
That is why this book asks what exists before it asks how to open it.
6. It covers the part the lawyers hand back to the family
I work alongside lawyers most weeks and they are good at what they do. The will gets handled. The legal paperwork moves. Then the family walks out holding everything the law does not touch. The pension office that needs a form. The subscriptions still billing a closed card. The utility in one name. The safe deposit box the bank seals the moment it is notified. That is the pile I watch families carry alone. This book is for that pile.
7. It gets finished, because every page tells you what to write
This is the part people underestimate. I have been handed half completed planners, and a half completed planner is a locked door with a note on it.
They go unfinished because a blank page asks you to invent the questions before you can answer them. Every page here asks instead. Where is it. What opens it. Who should know.
And it asks for things you would never think to write down. Who cuts the lawn. Which plumber you actually trust. The vet who has the dog's history. The neighbor with the spare key.
Your family will need all of it, and right now none of it is written anywhere.
8. You have thirty days to decide it is not for you
Let me be straightforward, because you have bought a planner before and it is sitting in a drawer right now.
Take thirty days with it. Open it, work through the first section, the one about the phone, and see whether the questions are the ones your family would actually need answered.
If it is not the one, send it back. Every cent is refunded and returns cost you nothing.
That is a fair way to find out, and it is more than the last one ever gave you.
9. The families who arrive with one completed are out in weeks, not months
I can tell within ten minutes of meeting a family whether somebody wrote things down.
The ones who did are through the practical work in a couple of weeks, and they spend the rest of the time doing what they should be doing. The ones who did not are still making phone calls in the spring.
When a family comes through my door with this one completed, the difference is not subtle.
