What Documents Does Your Family Need If You Die?
When someone dies, the people closest to them become administrators overnight — while grieving, and usually with no idea where anything is. Most of the delay in settling an estate isn't legal complexity. It's searching.
This is the checklist of what they'll need. Work through it once and you will have removed months of difficulty from the worst period of your family's life.
If you've just lost someone
Start with three things: the death certificate (order 10–15 certified copies — nearly every institution wants an original), the will, and any life insurance policies. Everything else can wait a week. Nothing on this list has to be done today.
The checklist
1. Legal and identity
- Your will — the signed original, and a note saying where it is. A will nobody can find is treated as a will that doesn't exist.
- Trust documents, if you have any
- Birth certificate
- Social Security card or national insurance number
- Passport and driver's licence
- Marriage certificate, and divorce decrees or separation agreements
- Prenuptial agreement, if applicable
- Military discharge papers (DD-214) — required for veterans' burial and survivor benefits, and routinely impossible to find
- Citizenship or naturalisation papers
- Durable power of attorney — names who can act financially if you're alive but incapacitated
2. Financial
The recurring problem here isn't documents — it's existence. Families routinely miss accounts entirely because nobody knew they were there.
- A list of every bank account with the institution and account type
- Investment and brokerage accounts
- Retirement accounts — 401(k), IRA, workplace pensions
- Life insurance policies — insurer, policy number, beneficiary. Billions in benefits go unclaimed because nobody knew a policy existed.
- Annuities
- Outstanding debts — mortgages, loans, credit cards, anything co-signed
- The last two to three years of tax returns
- Business ownership documents, partnership or operating agreements
- Details of any safe deposit box, including where the key is
Check your beneficiary designations
Retirement accounts and life insurance pass by beneficiary designation, not by your will. Whoever is named on the policy receives the money — even if your will says otherwise. Ex-spouses inherit by accident this way every year. Review these whenever your family circumstances change.
3. Property and assets
- Property deeds and title documents
- Mortgage statements
- Vehicle titles and registrations
- Home, auto and umbrella insurance policies
- Rental or lease agreements, as landlord or tenant
- Storage unit location, access code and payment details
- Valuations or appraisals for jewellery, art or collections
4. Medical and end-of-life
These matter before death, not after — and they're the ones families most regret not having.
- Advance directive or living will — your wishes on life-sustaining treatment
- Healthcare power of attorney — who decides if you can't
- DNR order, if you have one
- Organ donation preferences
- Health insurance details
- A current list of medications and allergies
- Funeral or burial wishes — burial vs cremation, where, any prepaid arrangement
Write the funeral wishes down even if you think it's obvious. Families argue about this, and the argument is always worse than the decision.
5. Digital
This category barely existed a generation ago and is now where most of the difficulty lives.
- Your phone passcode. Two-factor codes arrive on that phone. Without it, almost nothing else can be accessed.
- Password manager master password, and how to reach it
- Email account access — the master key to most password resets
- Cloud photo storage — iCloud, Google Photos. Often the only copy of decades of family photographs.
- Social media accounts and what you'd like done with them
- Subscriptions and recurring payments, so they can be cancelled
- Cryptocurrency wallets and seed phrases. Unrecoverable without them. Permanently.
- Domain names, websites or online businesses
Apple's Legacy Contact and Google's Inactive Account Manager both let you nominate someone in advance. Both take about five minutes and are worth doing today.
6. Personal and practical
- A contact list — who should be told, with phone numbers. Surprisingly hard to assemble from someone else's phone.
- Your employer's HR contact, for final pay and death-in-service benefits
- Your accountant, lawyer and financial adviser
- Instructions for pets — who takes them, and their vet
- Household practicalities — utilities, alarm codes, where the water shut-off is
- Letters to the people you love. Not administration, but the thing they'll actually keep.
Where to keep all of it
Gathering the documents is half the job. The other half is making sure they can be found.
A home safe is fine for originals, as long as someone else knows the combination and it's fire-rated. A safe nobody can open is just an expensive delay.
A safe deposit box has a real drawback: in many jurisdictions it can be sealed on death until an executor is formally appointed — which is exactly when your family needs the will inside it. Never store the only copy of your will in one.
A digital vault solves the findability problem, provided access is genuinely controlled: encrypted, searchable from anywhere, with named contacts who get access only when they should. This is the approach that fails least often.
Whatever you choose, do the one thing most people skip: tell someone it exists. The most carefully organised estate in the world is useless if nobody knows where to look.
Keep the whole list in one place
Rememberli stores every document on this checklist in one encrypted vault, lets you name trusted contacts who receive access only when it's time, and delivers your letter to them first — so they know what they're looking at before they see any of it. Free to start, on iPhone and Android.
This article is general information, not legal advice. Requirements for wills, powers of attorney and estate administration vary by state and country. For a large, blended or contested estate, speak to a qualified attorney. Rememberli is not a law firm.
