The week after the funeral is when a family discovers what was never written down. A widow sits at the table her husband managed everything from, holding a phone full of mobile money confirmations...
The week after the funeral is when a family discovers what was never written down. A widow sits at the table her husband managed everything from, holding a phone full of mobile money confirmations she cannot interpret, a drawer of papers in no order, and a stream of visitors: some bringing condolences, some bringing claims. He owed me. He promised me. The plot by the road was being held for my son. She has no way to know which claims are true, because the only person who knew is gone, and he kept the whole architecture of the family's money where so many heads of families keep it: in his head.
Nothing that happens in that week is a paperwork problem. It is a grief problem, a power problem, and sometimes the beginning of a family's undoing. And almost all of it was preventable years earlier, by the least glamorous discipline in the entire literature of family wealth.
Gregory Curtis spent more than thirty years advising wealthy families, first inside a Pittsburgh family office and then at Greycourt & Co., the firm he founded, and his 2012 book The Stewardship of Wealth ranges across risk, advisors, committees, and markets. But near the end, in a chapter on the documents a family should keep, he compresses everything into one sentence, and he writes it with an exclamation mark, which is not his habit: "it doesn't matter what the issue is: if it's important, write it down!"
Curtis means it as fiduciary practice for families with investment portfolios, and his examples come dressed in American vocabulary: investment policy statements, spending policies, manager guidelines, the standard forms of a United States advisory industry that most of our readers, managing family money without a private bank, will never encounter. Set the forms aside; we will, throughout. The discipline underneath the forms is the most portable idea in his book, and this essay is about moving it into a household whose instruments are land, livestock, a shop, school fees, a savings group, and each other.
Start with why writing works, because it is not really about memory. It is about the difference between the person you are on an ordinary Tuesday and the person you become in a crisis.
In his chapter on risk, Curtis gives advice that sounds like it belongs to markets but belongs to life: "Develop a crisis-management program: Decide now, while you are calm, exactly what you will do during the next period of market stress, whether that stress comes in the form of a bear or bull market. Write the program down, as well as the rationale for it." The point, he explains, is to protect the family from greed and fear, and from the mind's talent for rewriting its own rules under pressure.
Notice the strange detail: he says stress comes in bull markets too. The good year is a crisis wearing celebration clothes. And notice the instruction most people skip: write down the rationale, not just the rule, because a rule whose reasons are forgotten gets discarded exactly when it is needed.
Now translate the storm. For Curtis's readers it is a market crash. For our families it is a drought year, a job lost in the diaspora, a currency sliding, a sudden illness, a death. The question is identical: what will this family do when the bad season comes? Which asset is sold first, and which is never sold? Do we borrow, and against what, and up to what ceiling? Whose school fees are protected before anything else is paid? A family that answers those questions in the calm season, on paper, with reasons attached, will make its worst-day decisions with its best-day mind. A family that waits will decide in the storm, which means fear will decide, or the loudest relative will, and the two are often the same thing.
Curtis gives a second reason for writing things down, and it is the one that rescues families rather than portfolios. Family money, he observes, is managed by a cast that changes: different members, different years, different memories. "In such cases disagreements can easily arise regarding the proper course to be taken, the role played by individual investments, or the reasons certain policies and strategies were adopted. The existence of a written investment policy statement serves as an objective method of resolving such disagreements, and, indeed, as a way of reducing the likelihood that such disagreements will arise."
Read that last clause twice, because it is the quiet miracle of documents. A written rule does not just win arguments. It prevents them. Nobody relitigates what everyone can read.
Every family carries disputes that exist only because something lived in memory instead of on paper. Whether the money the brother sent in 2019 was a gift or a loan. Whether the shop's profits were meant to be reinvested or shared. What exactly the grandfather said about the boundary of the plot, and to whom, and when. In the absence of a document, these questions are decided by whoever remembers most confidently, and confidence is not evidence; it usually tracks power, not truth. The strongest personality becomes the family's court of record. Paper is the great equalizer in a family precisely because it has no seniority, no gender, and no temper. It says the same thing to the eldest son as to the youngest widow, which is exactly why the people best served by writing things down are the people with the least standing to win a memory contest.
Here the vocabulary gets American again, and we should be honest about it. Curtis's centerpiece document is the investment policy statement, the IPS, a standard form of the United States wealth industry, drafted with advisors, referencing asset classes and benchmarks. As machinery, it does not exist for a family running its money through a bank account, a SACCO (a member-owned savings cooperative), a shop, and land. But listen to what Curtis says the document should be, because this is where he stops sounding like an advisor and starts sounding like a grandfather. He rejects the templated version outright. The best family policy, he writes, focuses on the family itself, "its antecedents, its culture, its hopes, its worries," and then he sets the standard that transfers to any household on earth: "A family IPS should be written with the thought that it will be read by a family member a generation or two down the road. It should therefore be interesting, easy to understand, nontechnical in its language," and it should make the reader "proud to be a member of a family that was concerned enough about the future to pen such a document."
That is not a compliance instruction. That is a literary one. The test of your family's money rulebook is not whether it would satisfy an auditor but whether a grandchild, finding it in thirty years, could read it in one sitting, understand every sentence, and come away proud.
So write that book, and keep it short. Ours would have five parts, and yours may differ: what we own and exactly where it is, and where the proofs are. What we never sell, and why, in words strong enough to survive a tempting offer. What we do in a bad year, in order, decided in the calm. What we do in a good year, because windfalls evaporate faster than droughts consume. And who decides what, so that no decision waits on a ghost or a group chat. Ten pages at most, in the language your family actually speaks at table, with the reasons included. Version it like the living thing it is: read it aloud once a year, amend it openly, date the amendments.
There is a second document in Curtis's chapter, and he ranks it, remarkably, above the formal ones. "Although not formal fiduciary documents," he writes, "a letter from the patriarch or matriarch to children, grandchildren, trustees, or more remote descendants can have even greater effect, because it is a very personal document." Then he lets himself imagine the full version: "I can envision a multigenerational series of such letters, each penned by the next steward in his or her turn over the years. What a wonderful legacy for any family!"
The rulebook says what to do. The letter says who we are and why we did it this way. Rules transfer decisions; letters transfer judgment, and judgment is what the next steward will need on the day the rules run out. A letter can hold what no policy can: that the land matters because of what it cost your mother to keep it; that the family once nearly broke over money and how the wound was closed; that you were afraid in 2020 and what you learned by not panicking. Write it to a person, not to posterity. Tell the truth, including one failure, because a letter with no failures in it will be read as decoration, and this document's power is precisely that it is not decoration.
And picture Curtis's full vision landing in an African family: a chain of letters, one per steward, each written near the end of a stewardship and read at the start of the next. The handover in our families is so often silent, land passing at a burial, authority passing in a hospital corridor, that a family with even two such letters possesses something rare on this continent and everywhere: a written chain of custody for its judgment, not just its property.
The book stops at portfolios and letters. We go one step further, back to the table where this essay began, because the reader Curtis never quite imagines is the one our families know too well: the widow or widower facing a drawer of unsorted papers and a queue of confident claimants.
Every household head should maintain what we would call the bad-day page: a single sheet, updated twice a year, that answers the questions grief will otherwise have to answer. Every account and mobile money line in the family's life, and who can access each. Every debt owed and owing, with names and amounts, so that the visitors' claims can be checked against the dead's own record. Every plot and its papers' location. The savings group, the burial society (the mutual-aid fund many of our communities keep for exactly this week), the insurance if any exists. And the names: who to call at the SACCO, at the bank, at the land office. One page. It is not a will, it replaces no legal process, and in every jurisdiction the formal requirements differ, so take the legal questions to someone qualified where you live. But the bad-day page does something no will does: it arrives in the first week, when the will is still weeks away and the claimants are already at the door.
This is the natural home of the Document Vault in LegacyPot: the family rulebook, the letters, and the bad-day page, kept where fire, moving house, and time cannot take them, and where the family members who need them can reach them from any country. Not because an app makes a family diligent, but because a document that cannot be found on the day it is needed was never really written.
This month, write three pages, in this order.
First, the bad-day page: accounts, debts, documents, names. One sheet, and tell one trusted person it exists and where. Second, the bad-year rules: what this family does, in order, when the storm comes, and what it does when the windfall comes, with reasons attached, agreed while everyone is calm. Third, the first letter: one steward, writing to the next, saying what the rules cannot. Then date all three, put them where they will be found, and put a date in next year's calendar to read them again.
Curtis's sentence deserves to hang over every family's money table, so end with it: if it's important, write it down. The family that does this owns something better than a fortune. It owns a memory that does not die with anyone, argue with anyone, or depend on anyone's best day. That is what paper is for.