Ethical Will: The Memo Nobody Thinks to Write

Ethical Will: The Memo Nobody Thinks to Write

A few weeks ago I found myself at a work event listening to some genuinely impressive people speak. One of them mentioned something called an ethical will. I’d never heard of it. And for the entire four-plus hour drive home, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. If you passed me on the highway that night and saw a guy talking to himself and crying, that was me. No, I wasn’t losing it. Well, maybe a little.

By the time I pulled into my driveway, I had already started writing my own.

Let me back up.

On Wills

Most of us know what a will is. You die, your stuff goes somewhere. Pretty straightforward, if a little morbid. A will answers who gets what. It handles the logistics of a life well lived. What it doesn’t do is capture anything about the person who lived it.

That’s where the ethical will comes in.

The concept actually dates back thousands of years to the Hebrew Bible, where Jacob gathers his sons on his deathbed not to divide property, but to offer final blessings and life teachings. It’s evolved since then, showing up in religious traditions, family histories, and more recently in modern estate planning as a companion document to the traditional will. No legal weight, no financial instructions. Just you, in your own words, passing along whatever you most want the people you love to carry forward.

Your values. Your lessons. What you believe made a good life. What you wish someone had told you earlier.

The document can be anything you want it to be. That’s what makes it so powerful.

Here’s what hit me personally. I lost my dad unexpectedly at 61. He left me a watch, and to this day it’s my most prized possession. I wear it, I look at it, and I think of him.

But I would trade every material thing I’ve ever inherited for a letter from him. One that told me what he believed in, what he struggled with, what he wanted for me. There are questions I’ll never get answered. There are things left unsaid that I carry around. That’s a specific kind of grief that never fully goes away.

I didn’t get that closure. But my kids will.

Writing an Ethical Will

The process of writing an ethical will forces you to sit with yourself in a way most of us never do. What actually matters? What have I learned that I’d want to pass down? If this were the last thing they ever heard from me, what would I say? It’s uncomfortable and emotional and, honestly, one of the more meaningful things I’ve done in a long time.

And here’s what I keep coming back to. Anyone can leave assets behind. Wealth is valuable, sure, but it’s finite. It can grow, it can shrink, it can disappear entirely. A life code, a set of values, a letter that captures who you really were and what you really believed, that’s the thing that can travel from one generation to the next indefinitely. That’s the inheritance that compounds.

I’m not done with mine. I’m still tinkering. But I’ve started, and starting is the whole thing.

If you’ve lost someone and found yourself wishing they’d left you something beyond the financial, you already understand why this matters. And if you’re sitting here thinking about someone in your life who deserves this from you, that’s your answer.

If you want to start one and don’t know where to begin, reach out. Fair warning though. Once you go down this road, it’s going to get emotional. Turns out four hours on the highway is just enough time to remember what actually matters.

As always, stay wealthy, healthy, and happy