Every financial planner, every estate lawyer, every insurance agent has at some point told you the same thing: you should make a binder. A single document listing your accounts, your wishes, your passwords, your people. "So your family knows what to do."
Almost nobody makes the binder.
Not because they're careless. Because the mental image is enormous — a legal-padded fortress of forms, an afternoon with a lawyer, a list longer than they can face on a Tuesday evening. So the binder sits in the "I'll do it this weekend" bucket and stays there for twelve years.
This post exists to shrink the binder.
You can start the most important version of it in ten minutes. Literally ten. Set a timer. You don't need a lawyer, you don't need to know your policy numbers from memory, you don't need to type anything pretty. You just need to capture the essentials in one findable place.
The 10-Minute Starter
Here is the absolute minimum viable version of a family information kit. Fill this in and you have already solved 80% of the problem your family would face in an emergency.
Open a note (in your encrypted vault, password manager, or wherever you'll keep it) and write:
- Who to tell first. One name. The person who should be called before anyone else — usually a spouse, eldest child, or closest sibling. Name, phone, relationship.
- Primary email login. The email address that controls password resets for everything else. Not the password itself in a plain note — but at minimum: "Primary email: xxx@gmail.com. Password is in my [password manager / encrypted vault]. Login recovery is the number ending in 4567."
- Primary phone PIN or pattern. In-case-of-emergency unlock for your phone. Sensitive — store it where you're confident only the right person can reach it.
- Banks you use. Just the list of institution names and account types. "SBI savings, HDFC salary, ICICI joint with my wife." Not account numbers yet.
- Insurers you pay. "LIC (2 policies), Star Health (family floater), Bajaj Allianz car." No policy numbers needed for the starter.
- Recurring things to cancel. "Netflix, Amazon Prime, Spotify, gym at Cult Fit, the cloud backup I'm not sure you'll notice." These are the monthly charges that quietly drain accounts for months after death because nobody knows to stop them.
- One sentence on final wishes. "I'd like to be cremated. Please don't do a big ceremony. Tell my college friends Asha and Ravi. Donate any books worth donating."
That is the kit. Ten minutes. Hundreds of hours saved, for the people you love, on the worst day of their life.
The Weekend Expansion
If you want to spend a Saturday morning on this and build the real thing, here is what you add to the starter:
Financial detail:
- Every bank account — institution, branch, account number, joint holder, nominee
- Every mutual fund — AMC, folio number, approximate value, nominee, and a note that the CAS (consolidated account statement) can be requested from CAMS
- Every insurance policy — policy number, insurer, premium, nominee, where the bond physically lives
- Every retirement account — EPF UAN, PPF passbook location, NPS PRAN
- Any shares or demat accounts — DP name, client ID, nominee
- Any crypto — exchange names only in the main list; seed phrases stored separately and very carefully, split if appropriate
Property and physical assets:
- Property deeds — where the physical original is (locker? home safe? lawyer's office?)
- Vehicle papers — RC, insurance, loan closure letters
- Safe-deposit box keys — bank, branch, key location
- Any valuable jewellery or gold — with rough descriptions and where stored
Digital assets:
- Domain names you own
- Any monetised platforms — YouTube channel, Patreon, Substack, Etsy, Instagram business account
- Cloud storage providers and what's in them worth keeping
- Loyalty points worth real money — airline miles, hotel rewards, credit card points
Medical:
- Current medications and dosages
- Primary physician, contact, and any specialists
- Allergies and medical conditions
- Emergency contact preference if you're admitted unconscious
- Organ donation preference
The people section:
- Your lawyer (if any) — name, firm, phone
- Your CA / accountant — name, firm, phone
- Your financial advisor (if any)
- Your family doctor
- Specific instructions: "Please call my brother Vikram before making any large financial decisions."
The wishes section — expanded:
- Burial vs cremation vs whatever
- Funeral preferences — religious, civil, none
- People you specifically want told
- Social media accounts — which to memorialise, which to delete
- Anything you want done with specific physical items
Ninety minutes, start to finish. Nobody looks back at a Saturday like this and thinks it was wasted.
What NOT to Include in the Kit
Three categories of information require more care than a plain-text note:
1. Full credit card numbers and CVVs. Don't. If you must, don't write them in full — "HDFC Visa ending 4532, expiry 08/27" is enough for your family to identify the card for cancellation. The full number is a fraud risk vastly out of proportion to the benefit.
2. Standalone passwords with no encryption layer. A document that says "Gmail password: ...." in readable text is a disaster waiting to happen — whether through a lost phone, a shared cloud account, or a well-meaning family member who forwards a screenshot. Passwords belong in a password manager or an encrypted vault that requires a master password to open.
3. Crypto seed phrases in a single place. If you hold crypto, the seed phrase is the money. Written in full on a note, it's catastrophic if seen by the wrong person. Standard practice is to split the seed phrase across two or three physically separated locations, or use a hardware wallet with a PIN and store the PIN separately. This is its own topic — don't shortcut it.
The rule of thumb: if losing this single line of text would financially ruin you or your family, it doesn't belong in plain text anywhere.
Where It Lives
The kit is only useful if the right person can find and open it. Here's the short comparison:
| Storage | Findable by family? | Encrypted? | Updates easily? | Depends on a third party? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Paper in a drawer | Sometimes | No | Rarely | No |
| Paper in a bank locker | Yes (with succession certificate) | No | Hard | Yes (bank hours, access rules) |
| Google Doc / iCloud Notes | Only if they have your account | Partially | Yes | Yes (cloud provider, your account status) |
| Password manager encrypted note | If you set up emergency access | Yes | Yes | Yes (the vendor) |
| Encrypted local vault (e.g. SecureKeep) | Yes, if you give the trusted person the master password or set up a separate vault for them | Yes, AES-256 | Yes | No — data lives on your device |
For the core kit — the ten-minute starter and the weekend expansion — the best fit is an encrypted, local-only vault that supports multiple separate vaults for different trusted people. You keep a vault you use daily for your own passwords and documents; you keep a second vault specifically for your spouse, with their master password, containing all the "if something happens" information. The two vaults are isolated. Your daily vault isn't exposed to them, and theirs isn't exposed to anyone else.
SecureKeep was built around this model precisely because every other tool was built for one thing — password management, or document storage, or file encryption — and the family-information kit needed all three in one place, without a cloud account that could be locked or lost. Nothing is uploaded anywhere. A one-time ₹700-ish purchase, no subscription, no recurring server fees that could stop being paid.
Whichever tool you pick, the rule stays the same: encrypted, findable, updateable, not dependent on your primary email.
The Annual Refresh
The file you build today is the best version of itself on the day you build it. Every month that passes, it drifts a little out of date. New subscription. Changed address. New bank. Closed insurance policy. Kids move out. Grandparent passes. Priorities shift.
The trick is not to build the perfect kit. The trick is to refresh the kit once a year.
Pick a date. The first weekend of January. Your birthday. The start of the financial year. Whatever anchor works. Put it on the calendar for fifteen minutes. Open the kit, walk through the sections, update what's wrong, delete what's obsolete, add what's new.
Fifteen minutes. Once a year. That's the maintenance cost of the most useful document your family will ever inherit.
The Saturday Nobody Regrets
Here's the uncomfortable truth about family-information planning: the people who do it get no immediate reward. There is no payoff visible in the week you do it. The kit sits in a vault, updated quarterly, unused.
The payoff lands on a day you are not there to see. A day someone you love — your spouse, your child, your parent — is trying to think clearly through grief and is instead stuck trying to remember whether you ever mentioned that insurance policy. On that day, the ten minutes you spent this Saturday stop being ten minutes. They become the difference between a family that can focus on actually grieving and a family buried under administrative forensics for a year.
You will not regret the Saturday. Your people, one day, will feel it.
Start with the ten-minute starter. Today. While you remember.
Related reading:
- Unclaimed: Why Thousands of Crores in Indian Mutual Funds Sit Waiting for Families
- Nominee vs Legal Heir in India: Why 'I Added a Nominee' Isn't Enough
- The 10-Minute Family Information Kit
SecureKeep is the encrypted vault built for this use case — ₹700-ish one-time purchase, no cloud, no accounts, multi-vault support for separate trusted people. Learn more →