Putting your affairs in order: a short checklist

Most of the misery in dealing with a death is not the death. It is the estate: the will that was never written, the account nobody knew existed, the password to the phone with all the photographs on it. Every item on this list is something a family we have worked with wished had been done. None is expensive and most take an afternoon.

1. Write a will

The one that matters most. Without a will, the intestacy rules decide who inherits, an unmarried partner gets nothing, and the family has to apply to administer the estate rather than simply act; what happens when someone dies without a will is the whole of that. A solicitor’s will costs a few hundred pounds; a will-writer or a charity’s free will month less; and a will has to be signed in front of two witnesses to be valid. Name an executor who is younger than you and willing.

2. Make a lasting power of attorney

Two of them, in England and Wales: one for property and finances, one for health and welfare. They let someone you choose act for you if you lose the capacity to act for yourself, and without them your family would have to apply to the Court of Protection, which is slow and costly. They are registered with the Office of the Public Guardian for a fee and can be done online. Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own equivalents.

3. Write down what you want for the funeral

Not a funeral plan; a note. Burial or cremation, a service or none, a direct cremation, where the ashes should go, what music, who should speak, and who should not. A page in your own hand, kept with the will, spares your family the argument they would otherwise have about what you would have wanted, which is the argument we hear most. Is a direct cremation right for us is worth reading before you write it, whichever way you decide.

4. Check the nominations

Pensions and life insurance policies often pay outside the will, to whoever you nominated on a form years ago. Ring each provider and check whose name is on it. A former partner’s name on a pension nomination is a common and painful discovery.

5. Make the list of accounts

Every bank, building society, pension, insurance policy, investment, premium bond and debt, with the provider’s name and the account or policy number. Not the balances, which change, and not the passwords, which go on the next list. An executor with this list does in a week what otherwise takes a year of letters and lost-account searches.

6. Deal with the passwords and the digital life

Your phone, your email and your photographs are behind a password, and after your death nobody can get past it without a court order or luck. Write the phone passcode and the email password somewhere secure that your executor can reach, a sealed envelope with the will or a password manager with an emergency contact. Say what you want done with the social media accounts. The photographs are the thing families ask us about most, and they are the thing most often lost.

7. Put it all in one place, and tell someone

The will, the powers of attorney, the funeral note, the nominations, the account list, the password envelope, the birth and marriage certificates, the deeds, the passport. One folder, one drawer, one person who knows where it is. This is the item that families most often find undone, and it undoes the other six: a will nobody can find is no will.

8. Review it every few years

After a marriage, which revokes an earlier will in England and Wales; after a divorce, a birth, a death, a house move, a new pension. Put a date in the diary. An afternoon every five years is all it is.

When a death is expected

If you are doing this for someone else, a parent or a partner who is ill, the list is the same and the conversation is harder; when a death is expected is about how to have it. And what to do when someone dies is what the family will be reading afterwards, which is a reasonable way to see what each item on this list saves them.