Barbara Amsden

Barb Amsden, author of How to Laugh at Death and Taxes: What Executors, Willmakers, Heirs and Beneficiaries Need to Know, is a recovering executor. She's co-managed three estates and consoled others in the sorry throes of their executorial duties. She served for years in the salt mines of the financial industry, where she encountered the sometimes weird and often wonderful ways of financial institutions and advisors, regulators and policymakers, lawyers, tax professionals, bureaucrats, and...See more

Barb Amsden, author of How to Laugh at Death and Taxes: What Executors, Willmakers, Heirs and Beneficiaries Need to Know, is a recovering executor. She's co-managed three estates and consoled others in the sorry throes of their executorial duties. She served for years in the salt mines of the financial industry, where she encountered the sometimes weird and often wonderful ways of financial institutions and advisors, regulators and policymakers, lawyers, tax professionals, bureaucrats, and government tax authorities. Her experiences with funeral homes, cemeteries, as well as heirs and beneficiaries? Well, some she'd just like to forget. In preparing this book, she researched and became addicted to executor stories from the odd to the instructional to the "what were they thinking?!" Most recently, Barb's led a team and co-authored booklets and web content for Heritage Lower St. Lawrence, including project-managing the multi-disciplinary Live Our Heritage, which won the 2022 Governor General's History Award for Excellence in Community Programming. She also collaborated on the application for and delivery of a physical and virtual memorial to those men and women with close ties to the Lower Saint Lawrence who served and serve Canada and Canadians, sometimes paying with their lives. She's had articles published in The Quebec Chronicle Telegraph, Font, Wealth Professional, Life Design Portfolio, Canadian Investment Review, and Canadian Banker, and has also ghost-written articles for The Observer and the Irish Banking Review. Barb has made regulatory submissions to people who she thinks should know better, including regarding how to make estate management and other painful processes much easier. She longs for a simpler life and argues frequently with her husband about who better not die first. See less