Lots of people do but there are still those who don’t and it’s stupid. There are online places that help you fill out a simple will and software that will tailor your will to your state’s requirements. They can even handle moderately complex things. But doing one requires thinking about what we don’t want to admit – we’re going to be history at some point – and the complexities that can go with that. If you’re married or in a relationship, it’s easy to focus on the simple – it all goes to my spouse – but then you have to stop and consider what if the two of you get hit by a semi on the way to dinner.

Fortunately, the law lets you wiggle out of that problem if you’re married. You can say in each of your wills if we both get whacked together, assume she lived longer. That means only her will needs to be detailed and have thought applied to it. But if you have no will, then the courts get to decide who to give it all to and if it’s not clear, they guess. If your parents are still living and you have siblings, the odds are fair to middlin’ that the one you hate the most – or the one who needs it the least – will win.

And life itself can complicate things. If your family seems to live for having stuff that “once belonged to great-grandma Ethel,” rest comfortably in the assurance that your relatives will be scheduling duels during the funeral if you don’t will that relish dish to them instead of some other part of the family. (And the person who comes to your funeral last – or leaves first – successfully sprung the lock on the back door to your house and has all the family treasures (and other stuff) in a U-haul sitting in the corner of the funeral home parking lot.)

If you are married into a family like this, keep a different set of locks for your doors handy so you can swap them out before you head to the funeral – unless it’s your funeral, of course. What these types of families don’t care about or realize is that people are starting to take that sort of behavior to heart, and specifically making bequests of selected family pieces to this and that person in an attempt at moderating the discord.

But that’s just the real stuff. What about the digital bits and pieces of your life? One thing that lots of people do not take into consideration is just what’s right in front of you now – the stuff you have on the Internet and squirreled away in this place and that on the web. If nobody knows your passwords, nobody can read your email (except the government, who is probably doing it already), shut down your blog, etc. Of course, most of us don’t care about all that anyway. Nobody’s life is at stake if my email doesn’t get read or die if this blog suddenly evaporated but there are people who take their computer privacy and secrets seriously.

If your computer has a password, nobody will be able to get to anything on it. It’s even worse if you decide to encrypt your hard drive and you don’t want your loved one to have the password. There are people like that, you know. Cory Doctorow, a British author who also posts on Boing-Boing, wrote an article on this issue in the Guardian. He uses significant 128-bit encryption on his computer and external hard drives and split his password into two pieces. One is held by a UK attorney and the other by a Canadian one. That way, Canadian courts will have a hard time forcing the UK lawyer to give up his half, and vice versa. More than I want to do.