Letter of Instruction: What to Include, Section by Section

The will said who gets the house. It did not say the furnace guy’s name, that the safe deposit key is taped inside the desk drawer, or that Dad wanted the Sinatra song and not the hymn. The lawyer wrote the will. Nobody wrote the rest.

📝 A Letter of Instruction Is the Note Your Will Cannot Be

A letter of instruction is an informal document you write for your executor and your family. It sits alongside the will and the trust and tells people the practical things those documents leave out: where everything is, who to call, and what you wanted. No lawyer is needed. It can be typed or handwritten.

It is not legally binding, and that is the point. Because it carries no legal weight, you can update it on a Sunday afternoon without a notary. Your wishes about who gets the watch can change three times and nobody has to redraft a will. Families almost always honor it anyway, because it is the only place those wishes were written down.

If you are building this for a parent rather than yourself, the If I Die binder checklist is the larger project this letter sits inside.

🗂️ The Ten Sections Every Letter of Instruction Should Have

Estate planners at Fidelity and university extension programs converge on the same list. Each item answers a question your family will otherwise have to guess at.

Two of those sections have their own guides. The funeral planning checklist walks through every decision in order, and the digital estate plan covers the accounts that do not die with you.

✍️ The Template: Write It in One Afternoon, in This Order

Open a document, title it “Letter of Instruction for [your name],” date it, and work through these steps. Short entries beat blank ones. “Chase checking, ending 4471, online only” is enough.

1. Start with the first 48 hours. Who to call first, where the will is, which funeral home, and whether anything is prepaid. This is the page someone reads in shock, so keep it to one page.
2. List the people and their numbers. Family, then professionals, then the practical contacts: the neighbor with a key, the landlord, the person who mows the lawn.
3. Walk the house for documents. Note the physical location of every original: “fireproof box, hall closet, key on the ring in the kitchen drawer.” Include the safe deposit box, the bank branch, and who is authorized to open it.
4. Go through one month of statements. Every account that sent a statement or took an autopay gets a line. This is the fastest way to catch the accounts you forgot you had.
5. Write the funeral section as if ordering from a menu. Burial or cremation, religious or not, open or closed, music, readings, the photo you want used. Add the details for an obituary: birthplace, career, survivors, how you want to be described. The obituary template gives you the shape.
6. Assign the things that matter and say why. “The fishing rods go to Sam because of the trips.” A sentence of reason defuses most family conflict before it starts.
7. Add the messages last. They are the hardest and the most read. Even two lines per person is worth more than a perfect letter you never finish.
8. Sign and date it, then tell two people where it is. An unknown letter is the same as no letter.

⚠️ What to Leave Out: Changes to Your Estate Plan, and the Passwords Themselves

Three things do not belong in a letter of instruction, and two of them cause real damage.

Changes to the will or trust. Writing “I have decided the house should go to Maria instead” in a letter changes nothing legally and invites a lawsuit between Maria and whoever the will actually names. If a wish needs to be enforced, see the attorney. Fidelity’s guidance is blunt about it: informal changes to an estate plan are not binding and can lead to litigation.

The passwords. A letter gets photocopied, mailed and left on kitchen counters. Write where the passwords live (a password manager, a specific notebook, an encrypted vault) and how your executor gets in. Never list them in a document that travels. Our guide to recovering a parent’s accounts and passwords shows what happens when there is no map at all.

Anything already in the estate documents. Restating the will’s terms in your own words creates two versions, and two versions create questions. Point to the document, do not paraphrase it.

One thing people wrongly leave out: who holds power of attorney and healthcare proxy while you are alive, and where those documents are. The letter is read after death, but the binder it lives in is opened during a hospital stay. Our explainer on what a power of attorney can and cannot do covers why both names need to be findable.

📍 Where to Keep It and Who Gets a Copy

The letter fails in exactly one way: nobody finds it. Four copies, in four places, solve that.

🔁 Update It Once a Year, and Date Every Version

Accounts open and close. The person you named to take the dog moves across the country. Fidelity recommends revisiting the letter as often as annually, and the simplest trigger is tax season, when every statement is already on the table.

Date each version and destroy the old ones, or at least mark them superseded. If you update your will, the letter should carry a date after the will, so no one wonders which reflects your latest thinking. A one-line note at the top, “This replaces all earlier letters,” removes the doubt entirely.

If you are the adult child nudging a parent to write one, the easiest opening is the conversation about end-of-life planning, and the letter is a gentler first ask than the will.

🔐 The Living Version: A Letter That Updates Itself

Most of a letter of instruction is a list of where things are. A paper letter goes stale the month after you write it. A vault that already holds the things does not.

CareTabs gives each person you look after nine tabs that map almost exactly to the sections above: Profile for the contacts, Legal for the will and powers of attorney, Finances and Insurance for the accounts and policies, Passwords for where the logins live, Pets, Home and Vehicles, and Documents for the originals. Share it with your executor as read-only and the letter’s hardest job, keeping the list current, happens every time you add a document. The personal messages and the funeral wishes still deserve your own words, and the Documents tab is a good place to keep them.