Making your household survivable if something happens to you

The mistake almost everyone makes on the first attempt is writing a document about assets. What actually gets needed first is a document about operations.

Picture the specific person who would step in. Your partner, your sister, your adult child. Now picture their first fourteen days. They need to keep the electricity on, feed whoever lives in the house, tell perhaps thirty people what has happened, find one or two documents, and stop three payments. Nothing on that list is an asset question, and almost none of it is answered by a will.

So write the operational thing first and the financial thing second. The order matters because the operational document is the one that gets finished, and a finished imperfect binder is worth more than a perfect one you are still drafting.

In Case of Emergency is built for exactly this. Entries are grouped into seven categories, accounts and bills, documents, people to call, household how-to, medical, passwords and digital, and other, and each entry has a title, a where-to-find-it hint, and free-text details. Everything is encrypted before it reaches the database, it is readable by all adults in the household or restricted to a designated group, children cannot see it, and it can be printed or saved as a PDF to hand to a trusted person outside the household.

The where-to-find-it hint is the field that makes it useful rather than a second filing cabinet. "Deeds: fireproof box in the loft, key in the kitchen drawer" is more valuable than a scan, because it works when the internet does not and it tells someone what exists.

Aim for an hour, not a weekend. A binder that is a third done beats one that was never started.

Then set a reminder to re-read it annually. Half the value of the binder is destroyed by being three years out of date, and a yearly pass takes fifteen minutes once it exists.

1. The five phone calls. Who should be told first, with numbers. Employer, closest friends, the person who will tell everyone else. This is the part people forget and the part needed within hours.
2. The money that moves without anyone touching it. Mortgage or rent, utilities, insurance, standing orders, subscriptions. Say which account each comes from and roughly when in the month.
3. Where the documents are. Wills, deeds, policies, passports, birth and marriage certificates, the accountant's and solicitor's details. Locations, not copies, for anything you keep physically.
4. How the house runs. Where the stopcock is, which key is which, the alarm code, the vet, when the boiler is serviced, how the heating actually works. This is the section people find faintly ridiculous to write and the one that gets read most.
5. Medical. Conditions, medications, allergies, the doctor's surgery, and where any advance decision is kept.
6. Digital. Not a list of passwords in plain text, which is a liability rather than a plan. Say where the password manager is and how emergency access to it is arranged, which is a feature most managers have and almost nobody configures.

Here is the gap that makes the rest of it moot. A binder is useless if nobody knows there is a binder, and more specifically, a binder helps nobody if the situation is one where no one realises anything is wrong.

For someone who lives alone, travels alone, or is the single point of failure for another person, that is not a remote scenario. It is the ordinary one.

Check-In Switch closes it. You pick an interval and check in. If you go silent past it, the hub alerts the people you designated with the message you wrote in advance, which might be instructions, account details, or simply a goodbye. The alert fires only after the interval you set passes with no check-in, and the contacts can come from the household Contacts app. Note that the app is free to install, but the hub-side monitoring and the alert emails need the Premium capability bundle.

Two practical notes. Set the interval longer than you think, because a switch that fires every time you spend a weekend camping will be muted within a month, and a muted switch is not a switch. And write the message as though the person reading it is frightened, because they will be. What they need in the first sentence is what to do next, not an explanation.

Wellness Check-In is the same idea pointed outward rather than inward. The person taps in on their own schedule, the care circle sees a shared status board with streaks, and a missed check-in past the window alerts designated family members and confirmed external contacts. Use the switch when you are the one at risk of going unnoticed, and the check-in when you are the one watching.

A binder that points at documents only you can access has moved the problem rather than solved it.

Docs holds the household paperwork in folders whose visibility is set per folder, either everyone or adults only, with inline preview for images and PDFs. Put the things another adult will need to produce, rather than merely find, in an adults-only folder and say in the binder that they are there.

Family Records is the version built for children and for co-parents: a document vault plus a per-child information card with sizes, allergies, doctors, and school contacts, where records can carry an expiry date and anything lapsing within forty-five days floats to the top. If there are children in the house, the person stepping in will be asked for a consent form or an insurance card within days.

Home Inventory is the one people skip and insurers ask for. Items carry a photo, make and model, serial number, purchase date, value, and location, everything is searchable, and the valuation history is append-only, which is what makes it a defensible record for a claim.

Contacts should hold the people, not your phone. Doctors, schools, neighbours, emergency contacts, with birthdays and anniversaries, added manually or imported from a contacts file. A shared address book is also what the apps that alert outside contacts read from, so it is doing double duty.

You do not need to hand anyone a full set of accounts. You need to leave enough that they know what exists.

Nest Egg tracks net worth from assets and liabilities plus named funds and savings goals over time, managed by adults, with children seeing only their own goals. The value here is not the number. It is that it enumerates the accounts, the policies, and the debts, which is the list nobody can reconstruct from a pile of post.

Finances is the running side: budgets per category and period with transactions logged against them, adults only, with no bank connection at all. The nothing-connects-to-your-bank property is worth a sentence in your binder, because it tells whoever reads it that this is a private record rather than a live system they need to unwind.

Whatever is genuinely legal, the will, the executor, powers of attorney, belongs with a solicitor and in the binder as a pointer to where it is and who holds it. This guide does not replace that and should not be read as trying to.

The final step takes two minutes and is the one most often skipped, which makes everything before it decorative.

Tell at least two people that the binder exists and how to reach it, and make sure at least one of them is not in the household, because some scenarios take out the house. Print it or export the PDF and give a copy to that person. Name whoever will step in as a designated recipient on the switch. And say out loud, once, to whoever needs to hear it, that you have done this and where it is.

That conversation is uncomfortable for about ninety seconds and it is the difference between a document and a plan.

The person who steps in spends the first fortnight doing the things that actually need doing rather than searching your house for paperwork and guessing at your intentions. They know who to call, what leaves the account on the eleventh, where the deeds are, and that the boiler was serviced in March.

And the quieter benefit, which is the reason to do it even if nothing ever happens: the household stops depending on one person's memory. That is worth something on an ordinary Tuesday, when the person who knows everything is simply away.

• In Case of Emergency
• Check-In Switch
• Home Inventory
• Documents
• Contacts
• Nest Egg
• Finances
• Family Records
• Wellness Check-In

Every app in the library is included with the household plan. Install the ones this guide uses and skip the rest.

• How the private household hub works
• Seven questions to ask any family app before you put your household in it
• How siblings can coordinate care for an aging parent without a group text
• Knowing what the household owns, and letting the rest of it go