What Is Total Family?
What the product is for, and what your family gets out of it.
Somebody in your family tells a story at every gathering. The one about your grandfather and the boat, or how your parents actually met, or the year things nearly came apart and did not. Everyone laughs in the same places.
Now ask who will be telling it in forty years, and whether they will have it right.
That is the gap Total Family exists to close. Not the money, which your will already covers. The rest of it: what your family believes, why you made the choices you made, and the things you would want said if you were not there to say them.
What You Actually Do Here
Three things, in roughly this order.
Decide What Matters
You work through your own values, purpose, and roles, then do the same together as a family. Most families have never sat down and done this, and it is what everything else hangs off. It ends up as a single page you can actually look at.
Write the Record
Letters to your family, released to the person you name when you choose. Some are written to be read now. Some are for a birthday you will not be at.
Alongside them go the milestones worth remembering, laid out on a timeline, and the things your family says often enough to have become family sayings.
Decide Who Sees It, and When
Some of it is for everyone now. Some is for one person later. You set that per item, and you name who inherits the account. See before you start for how that works in practice.
Why Families Actually Start
Almost nobody wakes up and decides to write down their values. There is usually a reason, and it is worth being honest about what they are:
- A diagnosis, or a death in the family, and the sudden arithmetic of how much was never written down.
- A grandchild, and wanting them to know who you were rather than what you left.
- Selling a business, when a large sum is about to arrive and nobody has said out loud what it is for.
- An advisor asking a question nobody had asked before.
- Or watching another family come apart over an estate, and deciding not to leave that to chance.
If one of those is why you are reading this, you are in the ordinary case, not the unusual one.
Why Write It Down at All
Estate planning covers what your family receives. It has nothing to say about what they should understand: why the business mattered, what you hoped they would do with any of it, what you learned the hard way.
That part usually passes on by accident, in half-remembered conversations, or it does not pass on at all. Writing it down is the only way it survives with any fidelity.
How It Helps, in Practice
- One place instead of five. The values exercise, the letters, the photographs, and the account details sit together rather than across a drive, an inbox, and a solicitor's file.
- A shared reference point. A Family Vision everyone helped write settles a surprising number of later arguments, because the reasoning is on the page.
- Something that outlasts you. You name a Legacy Contact, set what they can see, and the record stays reachable.
Who It Is For
Total Family is built for a household: one or two heads of household, plus the family members they invite. Some families arrive on their own. Others are invited by a financial advisor or wealth firm who uses Total Family with their clients, in which case some of the setup is already done for you.
Either way the product is the same. The difference is only who is paying and who invited you.
What It Is Not
It is not a will, and it does not replace one. Nothing you write here moves money or transfers property. Total Family holds the meaning behind those documents, not the documents' legal force. Keep your solicitor.
Next
Before You Start answers the questions most people have at this point, including who can see what you write. Then create your family is the first thing to do.