Your own affairs
Putting your own affairs in order
For the person who has all the answers and no good way to hand them over.
A good many people arrive at this having just done it for somebody else. A year of evenings on a parent’s estate. Nine phone calls to establish whether a policy still existed. A filing cabinet you had to guess your way through. And one afternoon opening drawers in a bedroom, looking for a piece of paper, that you would rather not think about. Somewhere in that year the thought lands. Not this. Not for them.
The other half arrive because they have just retired, or moved, or turned a number that ends in a zero, and the job has been on the list long enough to be embarrassing.
You almost certainly have a version of this already
A folder marked IMPORTANT. A list on the fridge. An email you sent yourself in 2019 and have never opened since. The information isn’t missing. It only works while you are standing next to it, ready to explain, and that is the one thing nobody can promise.
Writing more down doesn’t help. Writing it down in an order somebody else can follow does, and so does the dull context that never leaves your head. That the savings account is the one to use, because your daughter is already on it. That the deeds are in the gray box and not the filing cabinet. That the neighbors at number 41 have a key.
The first thing your family needs isn’t the will
The will matters enormously and it matters in month three. The first two weeks is entirely practical: who has to be told, which account keeps the direct debits running, whether anyone needs to cancel a newspaper or water the plants in the front room. Almost nobody writes that part down, because to the person who knows it, it isn’t information.
So the binder opens on that tab, before the personal details and long before the accounts. Those first pages are written for somebody who isn’t at their best, on a day when nothing else is going well.
The parts people are glad they wrote
Not the bank details, in the end. The section for the animals, where you get to say that he is frightened of the vacuum cleaner and that half a can morning and evening is enough. The wishes, where you can be specific about what you’d rather not have, and where somebody can find out that the plot is already paid for. The letters, sealed, with names on them.
Those take twenty minutes and they’re the pages families keep. The account tabs are the ones that save time; these are the ones that are read twice.
Why it comes out as paper
A binder on a shelf needs no password, no charger, no subscription and no company still being in business. Anyone who can open a cupboard can read it, including the relative who has never owned a computer and the one who is very good with them and will still be locked out of your accounts.
You keep the file too, and it opens on any Mac. The book is the one anybody actually picks up.
What you’d be printing: the whole example binder, free to read.
Why it works this way, including the parts that cost us something: the decisions behind it.
Where this stops
- It isn’t a will, a trust or an advance directive
- It records that those exist, who holds the signed originals and when they were made. It doesn’t draft them and it isn’t a substitute for the professional who does. If anything, doing this tends to surface which of them you’ve been meaning to sort out.
- A passphrase you lose is lost
- Protecting the file with a passphrase is optional and off unless you turn it on. If you turn it on and then forget it, nobody can open that file again, including us. There’s no reset link, no recovery question and no override, because any of those would be a way in for somebody who isn’t you.
- It won’t keep itself current
- You change banks, the binder doesn’t know. It marks pages that haven’t been looked at in a while, and reprinting a page takes a minute, but the noticing is yours. Realistically this is a thing to look at once a year, in the same week you do something else annual.
- It runs on a Mac
- macOS 15 Sequoia or later, and only on a Mac. Photographing a document with a phone and bringing the photo in works; doing the whole thing from a phone does not, because there’s no phone app.
Questions people ask at this point
I already have a will. Is this not the same thing?
A will says who gets what, and it only works once somebody has found it and worked out what there is. Finding that out is what takes families months, and it is what this covers: which institutions exist, where the papers live, who to call and in what order.
Is it not risky to write all of this down in one place?
That’s the right question and it’s why the binder is built the way it is. It never records a password, a PIN or the combination to anything. An account or policy number appears only as its last four characters, which is enough to tell one from another and no use to anybody else. The binder explains all of that on its own second page, in front of whoever is reading it.
How long does it take?
An afternoon gets you a long way, and most people spread it over a few sittings because it saves as you go. You don’t have to answer things in order and you can leave anything blank.
Who should I give it to?
Whoever would be making the phone calls. Usually that’s one person, and usually they already know it’s them. Print a copy, tell them which shelf it lives on, and keep the file somewhere the family knows to look.
Where to start
Open the example binder and go to the second page, the one where it explains itself. That page is the argument. If you’d be content to leave that on a shelf for your family, the rest is a few afternoons of answering things you already know.