
The 10 Essential Documents You Should Have. Part Four. The Day to Day Documents.
The 10 Essential Documents:
- Part One: Will, Guardianship & Power of Attorney
- Part Two: Estate Plan & Letter of Instruction
- Part Three: Prenup & Life Insurance
- Part Four: The Day to Day Documents
I would strongly recommend keeping a binder of important information containing the following information, and update it as things change.
Your LIFE documents
Birth certificate, divorce certificate, social insurance number, permanent residency documents, citizenship papers, anything you can think of that would be useful. Even a coloured photocopy of your most recent passport, driver’s licence and health card.
Listing of your Assets and Bank Accounts
You should list all your types of assets in all your bank accounts as well, to be sure we know where it all is, and include login & passwords in there (I KNOW, I KNOW..) but there has to be a way for your Power of Attorney person to obtain that information easily to do work, budgets, and so on.
List credit cards as well as any other lines of credit, etc.
Household Bills and Contacts
A list of accounts you pay on a regular basis (e.g. mortgage lender, where is the contract, utility bills, telephone bills, insurance providers, and household everything). As someone who does not live in your household, I would for instance, not know who your provider is for anything, how to pay them, in what amounts and when they debit the amounts.
SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNT LIST
Anything you log into regularly, including social medial accounts, email addresses, make a binder list of all of this for them.
Personal Contact Sheet
Who do you want notified of your death? Names, email addresses, telephone numbers, so that way they can be personally notified, rather than to find out from the grapevine, or trying to call you and realizing you’re no longer alive.
This happens quite often especially to the elderly. They may have friends they call on a regular basis once every other month or so, and you know of them, but may not know their numbers or contact information.
FINAL: Inform your family + friends
Make sure that your family so also aware of your wishes. Prepare them WELL AHEAD OF TIME for who is going to get what, what assets are going where. If your children are all thinking the house will go to each of them in equal parts but that is not your intention, make it clear. Or if someone thinks you promised your car to them, but you meant for it to go to someone else… make it clear.
Talk about your final wishes as well as having them listed in your documents so no one is surprised. I want to be an organ donor, and to be buried ecologically (some mushroom coffin of some sorts), or cremated (although that is rough on the environment, I am reconsidering this path).
When my aunt died, everyone fought for weeks of what to do. Bury her? Cremate her? Bring her ashes back to her home country? Leave her where she was?
No one knew, and it was a heated fight for quite some time before they decided to bring her ashes back in an urn to the country she left and from all intents of purposes, hated with a passion and vowed never to return to.
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