This isn’t just about how much money you’ve saved up, the assets you own, or even the house you live in. It’s whether you’ve left a tidy state of affairs – or a minefield of paper trails for someone else to wade through.
Even if it’s something as straightforward as where to find the paperwork, there are always loose ends to tie up after someone dies. Getting things organised helps ease the burden for our next of kin.
Here are a few simple things we can all do to make sure everyone is better prepared:
The first thing is to go through everything in your name or that you own jointly with a partner. Can you keep track of them all?
You might, like many others, have more than one bank account, and if you’ve accrued pensions over your working life it’s possible you’ve got several different savings pots (maybe even some you’ve forgotten about – the Association of British Insurers estimates there’s around £19.4 billion in misplaced or ‘lost’ workplace pensions).
On top of that, there are other investments – ISAs, investment portfolios, property or other physical assets such as jewellery and artwork.
And with more of our life being online, it’s also important to think about your digital afterlife. For example, you may have thousands of photographs, videos, or music saved onto a cloud – not to mention any social media accounts. Who will be tasked with managing these archives? Keeping a note of all these physical and digital assets helps make things clearer and simpler for your beneficiaries.
Spare a thought for the man who accidentally threw out a hard drive containing millions-of-pounds-worth of Bitcoin. For the last eight years he’s been trying to reclaim it from a landfill site in South Wales, even enlisting NASA data experts to help him do it.
Cryptocurrency is an extreme example – lose the code and your investment is gone forever. But for all your records, it’s not just vital you keep a list of what you hold, others need to know where to find it.
Think of all that essential information – the deeds to your home, the location of safe-deposit boxes, passwords, names and numbers for your accountant and solicitors. Also, any regular standing orders or direct debits that would need to be cancelled, such as regular subscriptions, gas and electric bills, home insurance, or council tax.
You could keep this list alongside a will, in a drawer in the sideboard, or share it with your children. While not a legal document, it’s a helpful tool that can help put minds at ease.
The pandemic has made us all reflect on our own mortality.
Perhaps that’s why, particularly during the first year of the virus, there were reports of large increases in people writing up their wills. Twelve times as many under-35s made a will at the peak of the pandemic in 2020. And, on the day Boris Johnson went into intensive care with Covid, there was a huge spike in will-writing – up 56% on the week before.
But research shows that millions of UK adults still haven’t done this, potentially putting an unnecessary burden on their family and friends.
It’s not just what happens to your money. Non-financial arrangements, particularly establishing power of attorney, allowing others to act on your behalf when you’re not able to do so, can help take the sting out of tough decisions that may one day need to be made. Imagine what would happen if you had to be in hospital for six months, and the only way to access your instructions or paperwork was by going through the courts?
Making these arrangements doesn’t have to cost the earth – and you can even do many aspects of it yourself (although you should take advice for the areas that are more complicated).
The start of the year is an ideal time to check that you’ve crossed the i’s and dotted the t’s.
None of us can predict what’s round the corner.
To make it easier to get it all down in one place we’ve created a handy checklist: ‘What I own and where I keep it’ gives you space to note down everything from credit cards and loans to holiday homes and beneficiary contact information.
It will help your family to manage your affairs should anything happen to you.
And even though death can seem like a morbid subject, it’s good to talk, so maybe let this process be the starting point – share your list with your friends and family and have the conversation about what to do when the inevitable happens.
Would you like to chat more about this? Book a call with Daniel.
1 Farewill: The Year in Wills Report 2020
