The rehearsal: testing your plan with your heirs

Why rehearse

You know where everything is. That’s precisely why you can’t judge your own instructions: you fill in the gaps without noticing them. The person who inherits won’t. A rehearsal finds the gaps while you’re still there to close them, and it does something else that no document can: it gives your heir the memory of having done it once, which is what keeps them calm when it’s real.

Who takes part

• The person who’d actually do it. Not the most technical relative; the one named in your letter. If that’s two people (an executor and a helper), rehearse with both, separately if you can.
• You, as observer only. Sit on your hands.
• Optionally, a third person to take notes, so you don’t argue about what happened.

Setup: nothing real

A rehearsal must never expose your real seed, passphrase or PIN. Two ways to arrange that:

1. A test wallet. Set up a spare hardware wallet (or your old one, wiped) with a fresh seed, put a small amount on it, and write a recovery sheet for it exactly as you have for the real wallets, stored in a different envelope in the same places. The rehearsal runs on this wallet, start to finish, including moving the coins.
2. A dry run of the real plan, stopped short. Your heir follows the real letter: finds the papers, locates the devices and envelopes, reads the recovery sheet, identifies the software. They stop before opening any envelope that holds a secret. You confirm they found the right things.

Do the first if you can. The second is better than nothing.

The script

1. Set the scene. “I’ve died. You’ve just come back from the funeral. The lawyer has given you this envelope.” Hand over the letter and nothing else.
2. Watch them read. Note where they frown, re-read or ask. Don’t answer; say “what does the letter tell you to do?”
3. Securing. Do they gather the devices and papers? Do they know not to post about it, not to guess PINs, to keep your phone number and email account running, since codes and account recovery go there? If not, the letter’s first page needs work.
4. Finding. Can they locate each place the letter names, using only the letter’s description? “The safe in the study” is useful; “where I always keep it” isn’t.
5. Identifying. Can they tell which device is which, and which recovery sheet belongs to it? Labels help more than you’d think.
6. Software. Do they install the right app, from the maker’s own site, typed in by hand? Watch for the search-engine reflex: the first result for a wallet’s name is often an advert, sometimes a fake.
7. Restoring (test wallet only). Do they enter the words on the device, not the computer? Do they know what to do if the balance is zero? Do they notice the passphrase step? Restoring a seed on a new device is the heir’s page for this.
8. Moving. Do they send a small test amount first, then the rest, to a wallet of their own?
9. The claims. For exchange accounts, do they know which documents to collect and where to send them, and that they must not log in as you?
10. Debrief. Ask three questions: where were you unsure, what would you have done if I hadn’t been here, and who would you have called?

What to fix afterwards

• Every hesitation becomes a sentence, a label or a picture in the letter.
• Every “I’d have googled it” becomes a named person or an official URL written out in full.
• Every “I didn’t know that existed” becomes a line on the inventory.
• Anything they couldn’t physically reach (a bank box, a relative abroad) becomes a question about where the secrets are kept.

Re-date the letter when you’ve made the changes, destroy the old copies, and put the next rehearsal in your calendar. The yearly check-up covers the years in between.

Next: Your yearly check-up.