Leave a little instruction manual to everything you think someone will need should they have to sort out your life after the fact. At a minimum, this includes all of your financial accounts, from bank accounts and brokerage accounts to where you have the deed to your house. Make it very simple for someone to come in and put everything in order because it’ll save them a lot of time.
A side benefit of putting together an instruction manual is that it forces you to collect and organize everything. Did you have an account you forgot about? What about policy coverage you weren’t aware of? We accumulate a lot of stuff, financial stuff included, that we forget about. Taking the time to sort it out can be very valuable.
Do you have a last will and testament? Advanced medical directives or a guide to where stuff is? Of the six the only two I’ve addressed are the beneficiary information (which is redundant for us) and a guide to “where stuff is.”
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