How to Laugh at Death and Taxes
What Executors, Willmakers, Heirs, and Beneficiaries Need to Know
by Barbara Amsden

---

This book is for everyone at some time in their life. If you’re breathing, this book’s for you… or your parents, friends, teenagers moving into their first apartment, newlyweds, new parents, siblings, ... oh, and the person or people you name as executor. Hope to be a beneficiary or heir? Yup, you too. Think you can do it alone? Be my guest, but first Google “executor horror stories.” What makes this book different? • It’s four for the price of one: You can use it when you’re naming, accepting to be, or serving as executor, and if you’re an heir or beneficiary. • It’s by a layperson who survived: Most of what you’ll find about naming, being, and dealing with executors comes from legal, financial, or tax experts, and governments. Makes sense. For them, death is a growth industry. But for you, it’s about naming someone you trust to look after your affairs when you die, understanding the effort and risks if you’ve been asked to be an executor, managing an estate effectively if you’re acting as one, and knowing where you stand if you expect to inherit. • It offers useful tools: The book provides plain-language explanations, checklists, templates, and tips. • It’s long-lasting: While legal, tax, accounting, and financial rules change, and the book mainly uses Ontario examples, the process to follow and the questions to ask experts will not. Also, the approach is generally similar to that in many other countries. • Caution: To help relieve the subject's misery and tedium, this book uses humour—be warned!

laughatdeathandtaxes.com

---

“Barb Amsden combines well-articulated consolidated information, an intense approach to organization, extensive firsthand experience, and tales of woe and misfortune balanced with relentless martini-dry humour. This book is a must for anyone planning or settling an estate!” —MARK O’FARRELL, BA, CLU, CHFC, TEP, CEA President of The Canadian Institute of Certified Executor Advisors

---

Barb Amsden, author of How to Laugh at Death and Taxes: What Executors, Willmakers, Heirs and Beneficiaries Need to Know, is a recovering executor. She’s co-managed three estates and consoled others in the sorry throes of their executorial duties. She served for years in the salt mines of the financial industry, where she encountered the sometimes weird and often wonderful ways of financial institutions and advisors, regulators and policymakers, lawyers, tax professionals, bureaucrats, and government tax authorities. Her experiences with funeral homes, cemeteries, as well as heirs and beneficiaries? Well, some she’d just like to forget. In preparing this book, she researched and became addicted to executor stories from the odd to the instructional to the “what were they thinking?!" ​Most recently, Barb’s led a team and co-authored booklets and web content for Heritage Lower St. Lawrence, including project-managing the multi-disciplinary Live Our Heritage, which won the 2022 Governor General’s History Award for Excellence in Community Programming. She also collaborated on the application for and delivery of a physical and virtual memorial to those men and women with close ties to the Lower Saint Lawrence who served and serve Canada and Canadians, sometimes paying with their lives. She’s had articles published in The Quebec Chronicle Telegraph, Font, Wealth Professional, Life Design Portfolio, Canadian Investment Review, and Canadian Banker, and has also ghost-written articles for The Observer and the Irish Banking Review. ​ Barb has made regulatory submissions to people who she thinks should know better, including regarding how to make estate management and other painful processes much easier. She longs for a simpler life and argues frequently with her husband about who better not die first. Watch financial literacy expert Elizabeth Naumovski interview Barb about her book. https://vimeo.com/941983655 Read what others are saying about this book. https://www.laughatdeathandtaxes.com/testimonials.html

---

Contributors

Author

Barbara Amsden

Illustrator

Kelsey Power

---

Other eBook Editions

This book is also available in eBook format from these sites.

• Amazon Kindle Store
• Apple Books
• Google Play