Questions people ask before they buy

Hardly anybody does, and it matters less than you’d think. Write down what you know and leave the rest for another evening. Where a section is still empty the binder prints “Nothing was written down for this section yet.” Your family sees a gap rather than a guess, and you know what’s left to find out.

Yes, all of it. A whole finished binder is published on this site, every page of it, free to read, and there’s a link to it at the top of every page. Ten minutes with a finished one tells you more than anything anybody can write about it.

No. You buy it once and you’re not signing up for anything, so there’s no second bill and nothing to cancel. Printing it, reprinting just the tabs that changed next year, and taking everything you’ve written back out of the app are all part of what you bought, and so is every fix and improvement made to it from here.

Why that matters more than it sounds: what happens when a service closes.

No, and there’s no password to invent. You buy it, you open it, you start. You end up with one file, with your family’s name on it and .nestbound at the end. Keep it in Documents, in iCloud Drive, or on a stick in the kitchen drawer. Nestbound sends nothing anywhere: it comes from the App Store with no way to reach the internet, and your Mac holds it to that. Copy it, back it up, hand one to your sister.

Yes. There’s a Text Size setting in the View menu, or hold Command and press the plus key, the same as making a web page bigger in Safari. Command and the minus key takes it back down. Everything gets bigger, and it stays that way every time you open it.

Keep the binder where the person who’ll need it can find it, and not where a visitor would. A file drawer at home is right for most families; a shared office desk is not. There’s no box in Nestbound for a password, a PIN or a safe combination, and there never will be. It does keep account numbers, so your family can tell one from another, but only the last four characters print. Photograph the statement, not the note with the PIN on it. What you photograph prints at the back unless you mark it to stay out.

Nothing much, and that’s the point of paper: the binder on the shelf needs nothing from anybody, us least of all. Your app keeps working and your file keeps opening, because neither one asks our permission. How the file is put together is published, so opening it never needed us. A company that keeps a family’s answers on its own computers can close, and the answers close with it. There’s nothing here to close.

Three that did: when a service closes.

No, and mostly it isn’t about that at all. A binder earns its keep the first week somebody’s in hospital and the mortgage still goes out on the 3rd. People reach for one in case of emergency far more often than for anything to do with end of life: a fall, a bad diagnosis, a stretch where somebody can’t answer the phone for themselves. The questions don’t change. Where the papers are, who to call, what keeps running. The difference is that this time you get to hand it over yourself.

No. Nestbound isn’t a lawyer, and it doesn’t make wills, trusts, or the paperwork that decides who speaks for you. Make those with somebody qualified, and write down where they ended up. When your family goes looking, they’ll know who drew the will up, which bank holds the box, and who has the second key.