How to Create Inheritance Rules: Who Gets What, and Exactly When

A good plan answers four things for each part of your vault: what is being released, who receives it, when the release happens, and under what condition. LifeWyn spreads these across a few purpose-built screens rather than one enormous form, so each decision stays legible instead of buried in a wall of options.

You do not need all of them for every asset. A single default — everything to one person once death is verified — is a complete plan. The finer controls are there for the cases where one size genuinely does not fit.

On the rules screen you build statements of the form "when this happens, do that". The triggers are real events the system detects — inactivity, a missed check-in, a verified death, or recovery shares being released. The actions are concrete: notify a nominee, start a verification, grant or revoke access, or raise an escalation.

A rule sets the workflow in motion; it does not open the vault by itself. The actual handover of encrypted keys happens only through the verified-death and claim process — described in the nominee guide — with its own checks. That separation is deliberate: a single rule firing should never be the one thing standing between your data and the outside world.

Conditions can be nested — this and that, or either of these — so a rule can be as precise as you need. You can simulate a rule before you rely on it, to see what it would do against your current state without waiting for the real event.

Where something should be split between people, the allocations screen lets you assign shares by percentage across your nominees for a given group of assets. The shares are whole numbers and must add up to one hundred, so there is never an ambiguous remainder for anyone to argue over later.

Splitting by share is separate from deciding who is even told about an asset — the next control — so you can, for instance, divide an account between two children while keeping a private message reserved for only one of them.

Reveal rules control disclosure per category. For each one you choose who the recipient is, what role they hold — an executor, or someone acting under a financial power of attorney, for example — and whether the category is revealed after approval, never, or on your other terms. You can also set a delay in days, so a release does not happen the instant a condition is met.

That delay is a safety margin. It gives you, or the people who watch out for you, a window to intervene if something triggered that should not have, before anything sensitive is actually opened.

Rules are only as trustworthy as the control over who can edit them. LifeWyn lets you set who is permitted to change a rule, so that the plan you wrote cannot be quietly rewritten — a governance control that matters as much as the rules themselves.

Set this deliberately. The most carefully designed disclosure plan is undone if anyone with access can loosen it, and the point of writing rules down is that they hold when you are not there to defend them.