The Big Book of Jeff

People think that a will is the most important financial document they’re gonna leave behind when they finally take a big ol’ swing of their leg and kick the bucket.

I disagree. 

What you need to leave behind is an instruction manual.

I’m calling mine The Big Book of Jeff.

Now, before you tune out and think, “Oh, just what I wanted today—another product pitch from El Jefe!” this is not a pitch. Well, actually it is. But it was a pitch to Yulia—my wife.

See, for months now I’ve been promising her I would lay out all our financial life and whatnot. Well, really my life—because I had decades of building retirement accounts and buying insurance and such that she was never a part of. Some of the stuff she has no clue about… like old whole life policies, long-term care insurance I’ve had since my early 40s, SEP-IRAs.

Those are not bits of financial life you find in Crimea, where my wife was born and raised.

I’ve spent 40 years building a financial life designed to give me freedom. But I realized somewhere along the way that I’d also built something only I fully understood.

That’s a problem. Because wealth that your spouse can’t find, access, understand, or manage when you’re suddenly not there isn’t really much of a legacy… It’s more of a scavenger hunt.

If something happened to me that required she draw on my long-term policy, or my Aflac policy, or if she needed to know how to deal with issues inside the self-directed IRA that holds the apartment in Paraguay I recently bought through Ronan McMahon and Real Estate Trend Alert, I might not have a way to tell her, explain it to her, or lead her in the right direction.

But you know who’s really good at that?

Claude AI.

The idea popped into my head while we were driving back from Caminha, Portugal over the weekend (our favorite place). Lost in thought amid the numbing road hum on the A3 highway, I suddenly had an epiphany. I could feed everything into Claude and then tell Claude to write two versions of The Big Book of Jeff:

• One copy geared for my son, who has a basic understanding of US financial accounts and at the very least will understand the terminology used in these accounts and the descriptions of what to do. 
• And one copy for Yulia, who has no clue about US financial accounts and won’t understand a lot of the concepts because they’re so foreign to her knowledge base. Plus, she’s the one who wakes up next to me every day, so she’d be the one to have to manage the daily money and insurance issues. 

For my son, I’m telling Claude that he just needs to know how all the accounts are split between him, his sister, and Yulia, what’s in each account, what’s in the safe deposit box, and what to look for in the storage facility so that he doesn’t accidentally toss out a rare and valuable Polish version of the Wall Street movie poster.

For Yulia, it’s the same information. But the book also includes detailed instructions on insurance issues, policy coverages, who she’d need to contact, what she would need to tell them, how to access financial accounts, and on and on. A really detailed roadmap forward so that she’s not guessing and wondering what all the financial gibberish really means, and so that she’s not stuck in the limbo-land of not knowing what to do next or where to go.

I’m still working on the book; it’s not yet complete.

But I will tell you that the process isn’t hard. In fact, it is ridiculously easy when you employ Claude as your assistant. I uploaded bank and brokerage statements as PDF files, Excel spreadsheet screengrabs, insurance policies, even my latest Social Security benefits statement showing what I’ll collect at 67, 70, 72, etc.

Claude spent a good seven or eight minutes scrutinizing all the docs, then spit out a plan of attack for building the book.

He showed me my overall net worth—in case I was interested; I was—and had separated it into money inside retirement accounts vs. money in traditional accounts. He really dug in… explaining, for instance, that my beneficiary arrangements were wrong on a couple of accounts (still had my ex-wife listed), and that my metals account came with insurance coverage I had no clue about, and that I needed to request a revised insurance certificate that listed me andYulia as a way to protect her in the future.

That big, broad recap alone was worth the couple hours I spent tracking down documents and loading them into my projects folder for Claude to analyze.

But then he started laying out how to organize the book and showed me the language he’d be using to help Yulia understand the totality of our financial life, and the insurances that are in place, in case they’re ever needed.

Truly impressive stuff.

I couldn’t have done all of this in a month of Sundays—it was that thorough. The detailed, concise, and clear explanations of insurance coverages and how to handle real estate inside an IRA… even I couldn’t have written it better. In fact, I know I wouldn’t have been nearly as complete because Claude read all coverages and the fine print.

And that was just Claude’s first pass on giving me an example of what The Big Book of Jeff will ultimately look like.

Gotta say, I don’t like thinking about a world without Jeff… But I’ve realized there’s something worse than imagining Yulia and my children having to deal with that day.

It’s imagining them dealing with that day, with the added stress of then having to become a financial detective because I couldn’t be bothered to leave them a map.

Claude has eliminated that excuse.

The Big Book of Jeff isn’t really for Jeff.

It’s one last bit of financial planning for the people I love.