Things worth knowing before you need them

Every one of these came out of the same question. What do families run into, and which of it could somebody have written down beforehand?

• How many death certificates you need, and why nobody says

  The funeral director will ask how many copies of the death certificate you want. Most people say two or three, because two or three sounds like a lot of anything.

• The payment that arrives after the death, and why it goes back

  Social Security pays a month behind. The money that arrives in April is April’s payment for March, and if the person died in March it doesn’t belong to the estate.

• Don’t cancel the phone for six months

  Cancelling the phone contract is one of the first tidying-up jobs people reach for. It feels like progress, it saves a few pounds a month, and it is close to the worst thing to do early.

• What a hospital asks when they can’t ask the patient

  Somebody arrives at hospital and can’t answer questions. Inside the first hour, staff will want four things, and a family standing in a corridor rarely has more than two of them.

• Telling your children you’ve done this

  There’s a page on this site about raising it with a parent. This is the other one, for the person who has already done the work and now has to mention it.

• Your password manager already has a way to hand it over

  If you use 1Password there’s a PDF called an Emergency Kit. It was offered to you once, on the day you signed up, and you almost certainly clicked past it.

• Where the family photographs are now

  For about a hundred years the family photographs were in a box in a cupboard. When somebody died you sat on the floor and went through them. Nobody needed permission and nothing had to be unlocked.

• The will is read too late to help the dog

  Somebody dies on a Tuesday. There’s a dog in the house and he needs feeding that evening. The will names who gets him, the will is with an attorney, and nobody will read it for two weeks.

• Nobody should empty the house yet

  The urge to clear the house arrives about a week in, and it isn’t really about the house. It’s about needing to do something in two weeks where almost nothing can be done.

• The one document a veteran’s family can’t do without

  There’s a form called a DD-214. It’s the discharge paperwork, and a veteran’s family needs it to claim almost anything: the burial flag, a headstone or marker, a place in a national cemetery.

• Doing this from another country

  Everything about settling a parent’s affairs assumes you can walk into a branch. Turn up with the certificate, show your passport, sign the form. It’s built for somebody who lives twenty minutes away.

• Apple, Google and Facebook all let you name someone. Hardly anybody does.

  If you have an iPhone, Apple lets you name one person who can get into your photos, your notes and your files after you die. Google has had something similar since 2013. So has Facebook.

• There is money sitting with the state, waiting for somebody to ask for it

  Every state in America keeps a list of money it is holding for people who never came to collect it. Old bank accounts. Insurance payouts that were never cashed. Final paychecks, deposits left with the gas company, the contents of safe deposit boxes nobody opened.

• Power of attorney doesn’t cover Social Security

  A family arranges power of attorney, puts it somewhere safe, and thinks the hard part is done. Then somebody calls Social Security and finds out it doesn’t count there.

• The bank goes by whose name is on the account

  In most couples one person handles the money. They know which account the mortgage goes out of, which card the insurance sits on, and which checking account must never run dry.

• A binder doesn’t go wrong all at once

  Writing it all down is the easy part. The world carries on afterwards, and nothing tells you which page stopped being true.

• Three companies promised to keep this safe. All three closed.

  Imagine you sat down in 2009 and did the sensible thing. You wrote down where the will is, which bank the money is in, the name of the insurance company, and who your daughter should call first. You put it on a website built for exactly that, and you paid for it.