Barbara Amsden is the author of "How to Laugh at Death and Taxes: What Executors, Willmakers, Heirs, and Beneficiaries Need to know.” She is a recovering executor who’s co-managed three estates and consoled others in the sorry throes of executorial duties. She served for years in the salt mines of the financial industry, encountering the weird and wonderful ways of financial institutions, advisors, regulators, 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 writing this book, she researched and became addicted to executor stories from the odd to the instructional to the “what were they thinking?!"

​Previously Barb worked on shortening the settlement cycle to T+1 for the Canadian Capital Markets Association (CCMA), after earlier careers at the Investment Industry Association of Canada IIAC), the Investment Funds Institute of Canada (IFIC), Canadian Depository for Securities (CDS), and Canadian Bankers Association (CBA). She also project-managed and co-authored content for Heritage Lower St. Lawrence’s multi-disciplinary “Live Our Heritage,” which won the Governor General’s History Award for Excellence in Community Programming in 2022 and included development of a physical and virtual memorial to Canadians with close ties to the Lower Saint Lawrence who served and serve Canada, sometimes paying with their lives.