Making Things Easier for Your Family: A Practical Checklist

Last verified: 17 August 2026.

Ask someone who has settled a parent's affairs what the hard part was, and they rarely say the inheritance. The money is usually the most orderly thing in the whole process — that's what wills and lawyers are for.

What they describe instead is the searching. Not knowing which bank. Not knowing whether there was a pension. Finding a key to something unidentified. Guessing at what the funeral should look like. Discovering, months later, an insurance policy nobody knew about — and knowing, always, that there were things they'd have wanted to ask and no longer could.

Your will decides who gets what. It doesn't tell anyone where anything is, what you wanted, or what you never got round to saying.

That gap is what this checklist is about.

Start with the legal layer — but only start there

Some things genuinely need proper legal documents, and no checklist substitutes for them: a will, an arrangement for who decides on your behalf if you can't, and where relevant, your wishes about medical treatment.

These vary enormously between countries — what a document is called, what makes it valid, how many witnesses it needs, whether it must be registered. That's why we cover them market by market rather than generally, and why it's worth using guidance written for the country you actually live in. You can start from our legal document guides and pick the ones for where you live.

Treat that as step one, then come back here. Everything below is the part the documents don't cover.

1. The map: what exists, and where

The single most useful document you can leave isn't legal at all. It's a list.

Not passwords — existence. Your family can find their way into most things if they know what to look for. What they can't do is guess.

Worth listing:

• Banks, pensions, insurance policies, investments
• Property, vehicles, anything with paperwork somewhere
• Subscriptions and recurring payments (these keep charging until someone stops them — see our guide to subscriptions and recurring payments after a death)
• Digital accounts, and where the photos actually live
• Any debts, so nothing surfaces as a surprise
• Where the physical documents are kept
• Professionals involved: accountant, adviser, lawyer

Keep it in one place your family will find, and note the date on it. A list from four years ago is still enormously better than none.

2. Access: the practical key

A map tells them what exists. Access lets them reach it.

The email account is the master key. Password resets, receipts, statements, renewal notices, the account confirmations for everything else — it all runs through the inbox. Someone who can reach your email can usually reconstruct the rest. Someone who can't is starting from nothing.

A password manager with an emergency contact is the mechanism that actually solves this: one credential to pass on rather than dozens, with access granted on a delay you set. It is comfortably the highest-value thirty minutes in this article.

Platform legacy tools cover what the password manager can't: Google's Inactive Account Manager, Apple's Legacy Contact, Facebook's legacy contact. Each takes minutes, each only works if set up in advance. The details are in our complete guide to your digital legacy.

Two-factor codes. Worth its own line, because it's the wall families hit most often. Recovery codes saved somewhere reachable turn an impossible account into an accessible one.

3. Wishes: the decisions you can spare them

Collect family memories together. Invite relatives to add photos and stories before they are forgotten.

Funeral decisions get made by exhausted people within days, often with no idea what the person would have wanted. Every one of those decisions is easier if you left even a rough indication.

Nothing here needs to be formal — a page is plenty:

• Burial or cremation, and where
• Any religious or cultural observances that matter to you
• Music, readings, or the tone of it — solemn, or a decent party
• Whether you want a memorial page, and who should manage it
• Who should be told, especially people your family may not know: old colleagues, friends abroad, anyone outside the address book
• Practical wishes: pets, plants, the things that need someone within days

That last category is more urgent than it sounds. Pets in particular become an immediate crisis nobody planned for.

4. The people your family doesn't know

This is the one almost everybody misses.

Most people have relationships their family knows nothing about — a friend from a former job, someone they've written to for twenty years, a group they belonged to. When someone dies, these people often simply never find out. They ring months later and learn from a stranger.

A short list of names and how to reach them takes five minutes and spares two sets of people a great deal of pain.

5. The context that only you have

Some of what makes a life navigable is knowledge that isn't written down anywhere and dies with the person who held it.

Who is in the photographs. Why the family left that town. What the box in the attic is. Where the boundary of the garden actually runs. Which relative you were close to and which you'd stopped speaking to and why.

Nobody expects you to record all of it. But thirty labelled photographs are worth more to your descendants than three thousand unlabelled ones, and that's an afternoon's work.

6. The things you'd want to say

The layer everything else exists to support — and the only one nobody can do on your behalf.

Advice for a grandchild who isn't old enough yet. The story of how you met. An ordinary message in your own voice, for whenever it's needed. What you were proud of. What you'd want them to stop feeling guilty about.

None of it exists unless you deliberately make it. Voice recordings are consistently what families treasure most — not speeches, just talking. Ten minutes of ordinary conversation outweighs an hour you keep postponing until you can do it properly.

A memory capsule is built for exactly this: messages prepared now, held securely, and delivered to the people you name after you're gone — so they don't depend on someone finding a file on a laptop.

The realistic version

You will not do all of this. Almost nobody does. So if you do four things, do these:

1. Write the list — what exists and where, dated
2. Set up a password manager with an emergency contact, and make sure someone can reach your email
3. Write a page of wishes, including who to tell
4. Record one message for someone you love

Two hours, spread across a couple of evenings. Set against the months of searching it saves, it's the best trade available in the whole of estate planning — and unlike the legal documents, none of it requires an appointment with anyone.

The rest of this series goes deeper on each part: your digital legacy, what happens to your photos, digital time capsules, and the legal documents for your own country.