A Funeral Wish List Isn't a Will. You Still Need Both.
These two things get spoken about as if they were one thing, and they are not. A will and a written set of funeral wishes answer different questions, at different moments, with different legal weight. Most people have neither. Quite a few people have one and believe it covers the other.
Here is the short version. A will decides who gets your things. Funeral wishes decide what happens in the week before anyone thinks about your things. You want both, and the second one is the smaller job.
What a will actually does
A will moves property. It names an executor, says who inherits what, and it has to be made properly to work: signed, witnessed, and in a form the law recognises. It is a legal instrument with legal consequences, and it is the right place for anything to do with money, property, or guardianship.
It is also slow by design. The estate is dealt with over weeks and months, through probate and paperwork. That is appropriate for the job it does. It is simply a different clock from the one the funeral runs on.
What a will does not do
You can write funeral directions into a will, and plenty of people do. What surprises most people is how little that binds anyone. Legal Aid WA's guidance is that "normally, the executor of the deceased's will (or personal representative if there is no will) has the right to decide on the funeral arrangements as they think best."
Read that carefully. The executor decides. Your directions inform the decision. In general they do not override it. Most executors try hard to honour what they know of your wishes, and most families want to get it right. The point is that the law leaves it to them, so the quality of the outcome depends on how much they actually know.
There is a real exception in Western Australia, and it is the exception that proves the value of writing things down: a person cannot be cremated if they left written instructions, including in a will, that their body is not to be cremated. Where there is no written instruction, cremation can still be blocked if the spouse, de facto partner or senior next of kin opposes it. Rules of this kind vary between states and between countries, so check your own. The pattern repeats though. Written instructions get weight that remembered ones do not.
The timing problem
Western Australia's Consumer Protection publishes a checklist for families organising a funeral. Near the top: "Check the deceased person's will for any funeral preferences."
That is the official answer to how a family is supposed to know what you wanted. It assumes two things. That somebody can find the will quickly, in the first day or two, while arrangements are being made. And that when they open it, it says something about the funeral.
Often neither holds. A will is built to move property to people, so most wills are silent on the ceremony. And a document kept safely with a solicitor or in a bank box is not always a document that can be read on a Saturday morning.
So the will, the one document everybody agrees you should have, is frequently not able to answer the question the family is actually asking that week.
What funeral wishes do instead
A written set of funeral wishes has no job in the estate. It does not move property, it does not need witnesses, and it is not a legal instrument. It answers the practical questions that come up almost immediately: burial or cremation, a service or not, where, roughly what sort of thing, who should be told, any music or readings you actually care about.
Its value is not legal force. Its value is that it exists, it is specific, and the people who need it can get to it at the time they need it. An executor who knows what you wanted makes a better decision than an executor who is guessing, and they get to stop carrying the guess.
So you need both, and they are not the same size of job
We make an app for the second one, so take this with that in mind: get a will. Properly, with proper advice. Nothing you write down about your funeral replaces it, and anyone implying otherwise is doing you a disservice. If you only have the energy for one thing this year, and you have property or children or anything complicated, the will is the one.
But the funeral wishes are the hour-long version. There is no legal formality to get right and nothing to witness. You write down what you think, you tell the people who will be in the room, and it is done. The will protects your estate. The wishes protect the people who have to make decisions about you in the first week, before the estate is anybody's concern at all.