Where There’s a Will There’s a Way: You’ve Created Your Estate Plan - Now Don’t Be a Pirate

Of equal importance to leaving your affairs neat and tidy with a well-drafted trust or will is the comprehensive checklist that supports this instrument. The biggest gift you can give to those you leave behind is to make it easy for the person you’ve appointed to administer your estate to identify and access your numerous assets. Make the contents, location, and means of access to your entire treasure trove — those many things that constitute your estate and your legacy — easy and straightforward to locate and manage according to your plan. Do not make the transition a search for buried treasure.
Provide a map: a single point of information that provides the allinone guide to what you have
and who to contact for the assistance your administrator will need to wrap things up, close things out and properly maintain them until that occurs. Help them help you fulfill your objective for a smooth, orderly and efficient accounting and transfer of your assets. Your comprehensive trust or will serves the purpose of clearly stating to whom and how to distribute your estate, but they do not identify, in needed detail, where those assets are, the complete listing of all assets, and the means to access them.
This “one stop” source of information is the key — truly. This comprehensive list must include not only each asset or type of asset but the means of accessing it — the code, if you will, to the treasure chest. Internet accounts — social media accounts, email, online banking to name a few — require passwords and possibly other coded information, “your first car / your favorite first grade teacher / your mother’s maiden name” etc.; financial institutions and banks require personal identification information.
What should you list? Everything. Financial accounts: list the financial institutions, the accounts, the account purpose if relevant to managing their closure ie payments need to be made from them or payments received to them. Retirement accounts. Credit Cards. Internet accounts: social media, email, photo repository. Real Estate holdings: the location of deeds.
Key Advisors: your attorney, financial planner, accountant, insurance agent, your spiritual/ religious advisor etc. For all of these provide the contact information and location (if, for instance, you deal with a particular branch and representative) and access information – user ids and passwords. Property maintenance: in the interim between your passing and selling your real estate, list the person(s) to call if that property needs maintenance. Property Security, e.g. how to access your home, keep it secure, not trigger alarms. Personal relationships: add to this a list of personal relationships. These are just a few ideas for the many and varied list of assets that you may have that belong on “your map,”
After creating it, maintain it. Equal in importance to creating your map is maintaining it. As you know, this critical information is always in flux, you change bank accounts, you make new investments, you change passwords. Review this information annually. Set a date that makes it easy to remember this important task: New Year’s or another date that is key to you and is a convenient time to attend to it. It is a bit of a chore to create your first edition, but revisions can be fairly quick and take reasonably little time to accomplish.