This is an overdue post, after being silent for too long. I have never intended to abandon OSOMac, but I spent more than a year working on a new project, which has finally seen the light. This project is called LegacyNest: first and foremost, it is something I made for myself, as I wanted to stop worrying about my loved ones in case something happened to me. The service does three things:
- Asset archival and management: LegacyNest is a secure place where to store all information related to one's assets (properties, bank accounts, insurances, valuable objects, etc.), including all relevant documents. Of course there are plenty of other options for this, but LegacyNest also allows me to define my Beneficiaries, and to decide what I want to leave each of them, in case something happened to me.
- Pulse Check: every month, I receive an email and an SMS from LegacyNest, with a link. If I click on the link, the system assumes that everything is fine, and nothing happens; if I do not react to the message (and to the reminders, in the following few days), it will send all the information about my assets to my loved ones. In short, each of my beneficiaries will receive the information related to the assets that I have decided to leave them, and nothing more. Of course I might be stranded in a lost island without an Internet connection, and in this case I can name a trustee, who will be contacted by the system for confirmation anything is sent out.
- Will generation: At some point during the development Luca, a good friend and co-founder of LegacyNest, told me that it would be a shame not to take the next logical step, allowing our clients to generate their will automatically. Luca created the legal framework around LegacyNest, and designed our will (which has been reviewed and validated by a law firm in Singapore). We do not try to cover 100% of the cases, especially the most complex ones, but we hope to give everybody a very affordable option to draft their will for a fraction of the price of the usual channels. You can see here a sample will created using LegacyNest.
Current Status of LegacyNest
LegacyNest is now launched; the company is incorporated in Singapore, but the service is accessible globally (with the exception of the Will, which is currently drafted according to the Singapore Will Act; we plan to expand this to other geographies really soon). It has been a difficult time for me, I still had my day-job and was working on LegacyNest in the evening and weekends, but now we are finally live and I have decided to focus on this full-time, to give it the best chances of success.
Plans for OSOMac
I will try to be more active on OSOMac in the future, and to release soon a new version of HandBrakeBatch, which has not been updated for too long (I still use it, and I know I am not the only one). In the meanwhile, I invite everybody to try out LegacyNest: I have spent a lot of time designing the system to be as simple and straight-forward as possible, and any feedback is more than welcome.