Make a checklist of your important documents

Very often I meet clients who are retired, often widowed, who tell me that they are not sure which lawyer is holding the deed to the family home. Often these financial affairs where dealt with by the man of the house who died before his wife. The deed is just one of many valuable documents which someone in the future will need to look at.

In the article below Steve McDonald talks about the combination of factors like dementia and the move to paperless banking and financial transactions which make the preparation of of sort of written overview of the family papers a useful necessity. But even excluding dementia and our migration towards online transactions, it is not unlikely for us to misplace documents we signed 30 years ago. After all we have probably moved home several times and those documents have been in and out of various boxes and attics during their lives.

So for peace of mind I recommend to clients of all ages that they fill out a checklist of possessions. This will include a section for naming those valuable documents and where they are located and listing those bank savings and loan accounts with the relevant numbers. Here is an example of a simple list on the citizens information website:

Here is Steve's article: