Two documents, not one
This sheet produces two different things and they have different jobs.
The grab-and-go folder is small, portable, and lives somewhere everyone in the household knows. If you have ten minutes to leave — a fire, an evacuation, a flood warning — this is what leaves with you. The test for inclusion is whether you would need it within a week of losing the house.
The full record is the long version: where every original lives, where the copies are, and when you last checked. It is not for you. It is for whoever has to find things when you cannot, which is the whole reason it is worth an afternoon.
The location column is the point
A list of documents you own is only mildly useful. A list of documents with where each original is is what someone else can act on.
That distinction becomes concrete in exactly the situations this list exists for: a hospital admission, a death, a fire, a house move. In all four, the useful question is not “do we have a will” but “where is it”.
Fill in the location column even where the answer is embarrassing. “Kitchen drawer” is a location; a blank is not.
The modern gap: the password manager
The most commonly missed item on any version of this list, and it did not exist a generation ago.
One person in the household holds every password. Then something happens to them, and nobody can reach the bank, the insurer, the mortgage servicer, the utilities, the photographs or the children’s school portal. Everything is technically accessible and practically locked.
The fix is short:
- One other trusted person can get into the password manager
- Two-factor recovery codes printed and in the safe
- A list of accounts that would need closing or transferring
- Legacy or memorial contacts set on the major accounts
What people forget to tell anyone about
Life insurance. A policy nobody knows about is a policy nobody claims, and unclaimed life insurance is a substantial and entirely avoidable problem. Tell the beneficiary it exists and where the paperwork is.
Where the original will is held. A copy is not always sufficient, and if it sits with an attorney nobody remembers, it may as well not exist.
Beneficiary designations. Retirement accounts and life insurance pass by designation, and the designation generally overrides the will. They are set once and almost never revisited, which means a surprising number of them still name an ex-spouse or someone who has died.
The safe deposit box. Its existence, its bank, and where the key is. Boxes are found by executors more often than anyone would like.
Storing it
Originals fireproof box, or a safe deposit box
Scans encrypted cloud storage — a folder that burns is no folder
Access one trusted person who knows where things are and can reach them
Off-site a copy of the grab-and-go folder outside the house
The failure mode to design against is not theft. It is that the documents were in the building that burned, or in an account only one person could open.
Review once a year
Attach it to something that already happens — the insurance renewal is the natural point, because you are already looking at the declarations page.
Also review after any birth, death, marriage, divorce, move or house purchase. Those are the six events that make an existing document wrong rather than merely out of date.
Do the grab-and-go folder first, this weekend. It is an hour, it fits in a document wallet, and it is the only part of this list with a deadline you do not get to choose.