I have been doing thissince I was nineteen.

Straight out of high school in 1982, I stepped into my father's business.

I earned my Life and Health licenses first, followed by my Series 7, 63, and 65. What began as an insurance career grew into a comprehensive financial and estate planning practice that has served more than 800 families across several states.

My father and I spent many of those years working with more than 100 churches and the families they served. Again and again, we encountered the same problem.

These families weren't unprepared because they didn't care. They were unprepared because no one had ever shown them how to organize the important details of their lives, or make sure the right people knew where to find them when they were needed most.

That experience planted the seed for what would eventually become the Legacy Organizer.

The night Harvey taught me how to plan.

I had barely slid my new private pilot certificate into my wallet when the phone rang. A client of ours, an Air Force pilot, was being sent to South Korea and his family needed documents signed before he left. This was the early nineties. Ink on paper, face to face, or it did not count.

The night before, Harvey and I sat at his kitchen table with sectional charts spread across every inch of it. No iPads. No moving maps. Just paper, pencils, coffee, and time set aside to think. Harvey always planned the same way, slowly and deliberately, with a pink highlighter pencil. I never knew why it was pink. It just always was.

Halfway through tracing a leg he stopped and tapped a ridge near Klamath Falls.

This is where most people get it wrong. They plan for blue skies. You don't fold charts for the pretty parts, you fold them for the storms you can't see yet.

Harvey

He was not really talking about flying.

The table that made me write this book.

A pastor in Oak Harbor, Washington, called to tell us that a member of his church had recently passed away. The man's wife was overwhelmed, and the pastor quickly realized that the financial paperwork and countless details were more than he could manage alone. He asked if we would come and help.

Our Comanche was just two weeks away from its annual inspection, but everything appeared to be in good working order. So my father and I loaded up the airplane and headed north toward Oak Harbor.

As we approached Puget Sound, we could see the massive maintenance docks below where aircraft carriers were being serviced.

Then we felt a sudden clunk.

Almost immediately, the engine began throwing oil, followed by smoke in the cabin. There is no pause button in a moment like that.

We told Seattle Center we had a problem, turned toward Bremerton, and safely put the airplane on the runway. A magneto had worked itself loose, a relatively simple repair as it turned out.

Curt flew over from Paine Field to pick us up. We rented a car, took the ferry across Puget Sound, and continued to Oak Harbor.

And that is where the real work began.

When we walked into her house, nothing about it surprised me. And everything about it mattered.

The kitchen table was covered. Not with a system. With paperwork. A will. Life insurance policies. Bank statements. Credit card statements. Mortgage documents. IRA accounts. Retirement plans.

Everything was there. And nothing was clear.

We spent hours on it. Organizing, making calls, requesting beneficiary forms, walking her through what had to happen next, step by step. But there was one thing we could not organize. His death had come without warning, and she did not know what he would have wanted. Not the service. Not the details. Not any of the decisions that were suddenly hers alone.

That is where the weight actually sits. Not in what a person leaves behind. In what they never got around to saying.

We created something simple.

In the late 1980s, I was sponsored by a large law enforcement association in California. We attended police briefings and spent time with individual officers, helping them understand their specific benefits and organize the information their families might one day need.

That experience led us to create a simple organizer.

We soon realized this wasn't something only police officers needed. Everyday families needed it too. So we began sitting down with people and helping them document what mattered. Not only their accounts and policies, but how everything was structured, whom their family should call, and the reasons behind the decisions they had made.

At the time, much of our work came from speaking in churches across the country. We used the organizer with the families we served and saw firsthand how valuable it became, especially when life took an unexpected turn.

It worked. And it continued working for more than 30 years.

Today, that simple organizer has grown into a fully expandable program that can be as simple or as comprehensive as each person or family needs. You can begin with the essential information and expand it over time as your life, family, assets, and wishes change.

The Legacy Organizer available today is built on that same proven idea, updated so you can complete it at your own kitchen table, at your own pace, before your family is faced with a crisis.

The book came later because I wanted people to understand why this matters before asking them to sit down and organize their lives.