Reasons To Organize And Share Important Documents

After a death, there are a lot of financial and administrative tasks for your family to take care of that can quickly become overwhelming. Your family can end up spending months digging through drawers and file cabinets and waiting for new statements and bills to arrive just to figure out what’s going on—and even then, they might not uncover everything. Here's how you can prevent it.

Some of the most valuable administrative things you can do to help your family after you’re gone include:

• Identify important financial, legal, estate planning, and personal documents and accounts
• Gather the account paperwork
• Gather online account logins and passwords
• Store these items in a safe, easy-to-find location

To help you get started, we’ve created lists of common types of accounts and documents to be organized, such as:

• Financial and legal accounts and documents
• Estate planning documents
• Personal information, documents, and accounts

For a printable checklist of all the documents you might need to collect, use our resource Checklist: Documents to Organize and Share.