On the Tuesday after you die, the mortgage still comes due. So does the electric bill, the preschool tuition, the health insurance premium, and the funeral home's invoice. Your family will be technically wealthy. They'll own a business, maybe a house, maybe a retirement account. And they may not be able to reach a single dollar of it.\n\nThat is the part nobody warns founders about. Estate planning conversations are about who gets what. The first ninety days are about something less poetic: who can pay for anything.\n\n## Rich on paper, broke on Tuesday\n\nEconomists have a name for this condition. Research on what Greg Kaplan and Giovanni Violante called "wealthy hand-to-mouth" households describes people who hold substantial wealth in illiquid form, such as housing and retirement accounts, and so behave like people with no wealth when a cash shock hits. Their net worth is real. It just can't be spent on short notice.\n\nA solo founder's estate is that pattern at its sharpest. Most of the value sits in a business that can't be sold quickly, may lose value quickly, and sits behind a legal gate your family can't open yet.\n\nThat gate is probate, or more precisely, the period before anyone holds legal authority. In most places, an executor has no power over accounts titled in your sole name until a court issues the document that grants it (letters testamentary, or letters of administration if there's no will). Until then, banks generally freeze the account once they learn of the death. The timeline varies a lot by jurisdiction and by how contested or complicated the estate is, so don't trust anyone's average, including mine.\n\n## What gets frozen, and what doesn't\n\nThe useful question isn't "how much do I have?" It's "how is each thing titled, and who can touch it without a court?" Roughly, assets fall into three groups.\n\nFrozen until someone has legal authority. Your personal checking and savings in your sole name. Your business bank account if you're the only signatory. Money sitting in Stripe or a payment processor. Anything that passes through your will.\n\nReachable without probate, but only if you set it up. Accounts with a named payable-on-death (POD) or transfer-on-death beneficiary. Retirement accounts and life insurance with a living beneficiary. Jointly held accounts with right of survivorship. These pass by contract or title, not by will, which is why they can move faster. (If you want the deeper story on why a beneficiary form beats your will, that's a separate and important rabbit hole.)\n\nReachable but not liquid. The business itself. The house. A brokerage account that's fine to sell but takes an executor with authority to do it.\n\nMost founders, if they audit honestly, find that nearly everything lives in the first and third groups, and almost nothing sits in the second. The money exists. The doorway doesn't.\n\n## The bills that don't wait\n\nIt helps to picture the ninety days as a list of outflows, because the shape of that list is what you're really planning for.\n\nThere are the ordinary household costs, which continue at exactly the pace they did when you were alive, now with less income and more stress. There are the one-time costs: funeral or memorial, travel for relatives, certified death certificates (you typically need many copies, and each costs a fee), and legal filings. There may be professional help, such as an estate attorney and an accountant, who will often want retainers.\n\nThen there are the business costs, which are the ones people forget. Software subscriptions, hosting, and domains keep billing. Contractors and any employees still expect to be paid. Insurance premiums come due. If the business is a going concern, even a quiet one, it consumes cash every month, and your family may be deciding whether to keep it running with no access to its own bank account.\n\nAnd taxes don't pause. In the United States, for example, a federal estate tax return, when one is required at all, is generally due nine months after death, and most estates fall well below the threshold. But income taxes, payroll taxes, and sales taxes are separate obligations that still land on schedule. Your executor can be personally on the hook for some of them if they distribute assets carelessly, which is one more reason they need breathing room.\n\n## Sizing the gap\n\nYou don't need a financial model. You need two numbers.\n\nFirst, your family's monthly cash outflow: household plus business. Pull three months of bank and card statements and total what actually left, not what you budgeted.\n\nSecond, how many months you want covered without touching anything frozen. Many planners suggest thinking in terms of at least several months for a household, but a founder's estate has reasons to aim longer. Probate can drag, and a business in limbo needs its bills paid so it keeps its value.\n\nMultiply, add a cushion for one-time costs, and you have your liquidity target. Then ask the honest question: how much of that sits somewhere your spouse or executor could access next week? The difference is your gap.\n\nThe gap is often large, and that's fine. Seeing it is the first half of closing it.\n\n## Ways to close it\n\nNone of these require exotic structures.\n\nA payable-on-death designation on a savings account is usually a short form at your bank. The named person can claim the balance with a death certificate and ID, no court needed. Rules vary by state and country, so confirm with your bank.\n\nA joint account with your spouse or a trusted person keeps money reachable, though joint ownership has its own tradeoffs: it exposes the funds to the other person's creditors and can create tax or intent confusion. It's a choice, not a default.\n\nLife insurance pays a named beneficiary directly, typically within weeks of a claim, and it lands outside probate. For a founder, it's often the one asset that is both large and fast. A policy sized to replace income is different from one sized to bridge cash needs, so be clear about which job you're hiring it for.\n\nA properly funded revocable living trust can let a successor trustee act without waiting for a court, but only for assets actually retitled into it. An unfunded trust is just a stack of paper.\n\nFinally, give someone authority over the business account. A second signatory, or a documented successor with bank-approved access, is the difference between paying a contractor on Friday and explaining to them in March why you can't.\n\n## Your next moves\n\n- Total your real monthly outflow. Pull the last three months of statements, personal and business, and add up what actually left. Write the number down.\n- Multiply it by your target. Pick a number of months you want covered (six is a reasonable starting point) and add a rough cushion for funeral, legal, and certified-copy costs. That's your liquidity target.\n- List where each account's money would go. For every account, write who can access it today without a court: nobody, a beneficiary, or a joint owner. Mark the ones that say "nobody."\n- Call your bank and ask for a POD form. Pick the account your family would reach for first and add a payable-on-death beneficiary. It's often a ten-minute conversation.\n- Add a second person to the business account. Ask your bank what it takes to add a signatory or authorized agent, and what it would require from a successor after your death.\n\n## Where Heirloom fits\n\nThe hardest part of this exercise isn't the math. It's keeping the map: which account is titled how, who the beneficiary is, which bills autopay from where, and who knows any of it. Heirloom is built to hold that map, with the vault, the beneficiary details, and the handoff instructions together, so the person standing in your kitchen on that Tuesday knows which door is open. If that sounds useful, you can take a look at Heirloom. But the pencil-and-paper version of those five steps is worth doing today either way.