The classic estate planning question — "what do you want to do with this?" — sounds simple and is, in practice, broken. It assumes a binary world (keep vs let go) when the real answers are more textured. It assumes every heir has a preference. And it assumes that the heir's preference is stable enough to write down.
Heriteo replaces that binary with six explicit choices: Keep for myself, Keep in family, Sell, Donate, Dispose, No opinion — and a five-step strength scale from Uncertain to Definite. The granularity isn't bureaucracy. It is what makes silence a usable signal instead of a missing field.
The six intentions, and why each one earns its slot
Keep for myself
The clearest claim. The heir wants the object in their own home. Captured early, this avoids the worst kind of estate conflict — two heirs arriving with movers and discovering they had both assumed the same piece was theirs.
Keep in family
The most under-used and most generous option. The heir wants the object preserved within the family but doesn't insist on having it personally. A "Keep in family" rating on a grand piano often means "I want my niece to learn on it" — a claim that isn't selfish and isn't vague, and that any decent estate plan ought to be able to record.
Sell
Pragmatic, not heartless. Selling a beloved piece can be the most respectful outcome when no heir has the space or the appetite for it — see our piece on sell vs keep. The strength scale matters most here: an Uncertain Sell invites the family to talk; a Definite Sell tells the executor to act.
Donate
An object given to a museum, a charity, a religious community, or a cousin who isn't a direct heir. Donations carry the most stories — heirs almost always want to know to whom and why — so the intention deserves a free-text note attached.
Dispose
The hardest word to say out loud. Some objects are too damaged, too dangerous, or too personal to keep, sell or donate. Naming this option in the form gives families permission to be honest. The grandparent's medical equipment, the broken hi-fi that survived three moves out of inertia — these need an answer, and "dispose" is sometimes it.
No opinion
The most surprising and most valuable option on the list. We've reserved a separate section for it below.
Why "No opinion" is the rating most estate plans get wrong
Most inheritance worksheets treat a blank cell as a missing answer. The form goes back to the family with a note: "Please complete." This is exactly backwards.
A blank cell is ambiguous — it could mean the heir hasn't seen the object, hasn't thought about it yet, or has actively decided they don't have a preference. Those three states need three different responses. "No opinion" is a positive, deliberate, recorded preference: I have considered this object, and I am content for the family to decide without my input.
Once you make "No opinion" a real option, three things happen.
First, heirs stop pretending. Heirs who feel pushed to have an opinion on every object will invent ones, just to fill the form. The opinions will be weak, easily revised, and will produce false conflicts later. A genuine "No opinion" is far more useful than a half-hearted "Sell."
Second, the family discovers what it can move on without further conversation. If three out of four heirs mark "No opinion" on a particular set of dishes, the fourth heir's preference (Sell, say, or Keep for themselves) becomes the family's answer almost automatically. No one had to fight; nobody felt overruled. The ratings did the work.
Third — and this is the part families don't expect — "No opinion" is sometimes a kindness. An heir who marks "No opinion" on their late aunt's collection of porcelain figurines is releasing the rest of the family from having to ask their opinion every time the question arises. It is a permission slip, not a withdrawal.
Intention plus strength: the underrated combination
A choice without a strength is a guess. Uncertain → Leaning → Decided → Firm → Definite turns a one-word answer into a usable plan. A "Definite Keep for myself" tells the executor to deliver the object. A "Leaning Sell" tells the executor to ask the family one more time before acting. Both are valid; mixing them up is expensive.
We've written elsewhere about how visible, ranked intentions are the single best preventative for estate disputes — see avoiding inheritance disputes before they happen. The principle is straightforward: arguments come from invisibility, and the strength scale is what makes intentions visible without making them rigid.
Reading the family-wide intentions view
The intentions overview in Heriteo is, in our biased opinion, the most useful page in the product. It collapses every heir's intentions into a single matrix: object on one axis, heir on the other, intention and strength in each cell. Three patterns matter.
- Convergent rows — every heir agrees on what should happen to this object. These are the easiest decisions and the ones you can resolve immediately.
- Conflict rows — two or more heirs both want the same object, both at Decided strength or higher. These are the conversations you want to have before the inheritance event, never after. Our piece on deciding who gets the sentimental items covers how to navigate that conversation gently.
- "No opinion" rows — the family has implicitly delegated the decision. These rows are where the executor or admin heir has the most useful kind of latitude.
For families with heirs who live far away or aren't easily drawn into the planning, our piece on engaging distant heirs describes the patterns that actually get those rows filled in.
How Heriteo uses the intentions in practice
Every heir invited to the family workspace can mark intentions on any object. Each heir's intentions remain private to them by default — they appear in the family-wide overview only after the heir is comfortable sharing. Strength is captured separately; "No opinion" is an explicit, first-class option, not the absence of one. The platform flags conflicts proactively in the intentions review, so the family can talk through them while everyone is still around the same table.
The point isn't to mechanise inheritance. It is to make sure that every heir's voice — including the heir who is happy to leave the decision to others — is captured before it is needed.
A starter exercise for the family
Don't try to capture intentions for every object on the first pass. Pick the twenty objects most likely to come up in conversation: the named pieces, the ones with stories, the ones an heir has already mentioned. Get every heir to mark an intention and a strength for each one, privately. Then look at the matrix together.
- Use all six options, including 'No opinion' and 'Dispose'.
- Capture strength on every intention — Uncertain through Definite.
- Let intentions stay private until heirs choose to share them.
- Resolve conflict rows before they become conflict events.
- Treat 'No opinion' as a positive answer, not a missing one.
- Re-run the exercise once a year — life changes the answers.
The most generous thing an estate plan can do is treat silence as data. "No opinion" is not the absence of a voice; it is a voice saying "I trust you with this one." Capture it, and most of the rest of the conversation gets easier on its own.