The gap nobody argues with
August is National Make-A-Will Month, which is the sort of designation that usually passes without anyone noticing. This one is worth a minute, because the numbers attached to it describe something most of us recognize in ourselves.
Seventy-three percent of American adults say estate planning matters to them. Twenty-six percent have a will — down from thirty-one percent the year before. Fifty-six percent have no estate documents at all.
So this is not a disagreement about whether it matters. Almost everybody agrees it matters. It is a gap between believing something and having done it, which is a far more ordinary and forgivable failure, and a much harder one to fix by being told again that it matters.
Collectors will find that gap familiar, because it is exactly the one that sits between knowing your collection should be written down and having written it down.
What a will actually does
A will settles ownership. It names who receives what, it names an executor, and where sentimental property is concerned it can leave instructions. That is genuinely important and it is not the part collectors should worry about, because a good attorney handles it in an afternoon.
What a will does not do — what no will has ever done — is explain the thing it transfers.
It does not say that the card in the third binder is the one that matters and the four hundred around it are worth what it costs to mail them. It does not say which dealer has been straight with you for fifteen years, or which auction specialist knows your material, or which appraiser you would actually use. It does not say that the beaten-up one in the top-loader came from your father and should not be sold at any price.
A will hands someone a box and a legal right to it. Everything else you know about what is inside that box is not written anywhere, and it goes when you do.
The part only you can write
We have watched this happen from both sides. Families who handle a collection well are almost never the ones with the most valuable material. They are the ones where somebody wrote it down — not formally, not expensively, often on a few sheets of paper in a drawer beside the binders.
So this month, alongside whatever your attorney is drafting, we have written the other half: how to document a sports card collection. What a real record contains and why an inventory is not one. The four things almost every collector leaves out. How to photograph a slab so the certificate number is legible in ten years. And the twenty minutes of writing that turns a list of assets into something a family can actually read.
It is free, there is nothing to sign up for, and every word of it is meant to be done without us.
If you do only one thing after reading this: write down which card you would keep, and why. That sentence cannot be reconstructed by anyone, at any price, once you are not there to say it.