What to Put in an “In Case I Die” File

The short version: an "in case I die" file holds pointers, not secrets — which bank holds the day-to-day money, the payments that must not bounce, who to call first, where the signed will and the policies physically live, which password manager you use, and where the one sealed envelope with the master key sits. Never write passwords in it. Put a date on it. It's a map, not a vault.

Most advice about this starts with death. This doesn't. It starts with the morning after.

Picture the person you live with sitting at the kitchen table the week after you're gone. They are not helpless. They ran half of this household for years — their half, well. But there is a half they never held. Maybe it's the money: the accounts, the super, the loan, the share registry, the tax. Maybe it's the house: which tradesperson services the heat pump, when the rates fall due, where the spare key to the shed actually is. Whichever half it is, it was yours, and now they have to operate it cold — while grieving, while the bills keep arriving as if nothing happened.

That gap is what an "in case I die" file is for. Not the dramatic stuff. The Tuesday stuff. The quiet, operational knowledge that lived only in your head and is now simply gone.

What this file is — and what it isn't

It helps to be clear about the three different jobs, because people try to make one document do all of them and it does none of them well.

• Your will decides who gets what. That's a legal instrument, and it's your solicitor's lane.
• Your life insurance (and super, and savings) provides liquidity — money the household can actually reach.
• This file is the third thing, and nothing else covers it: how the survivor operates what they inherit. Where it is, who to call, what to do first, and in what order.

The will says your partner inherits the accounts. It does not tell them which bank, which app, that the rates come out of the offset, or that the insurance auto-renews in March. That's this file's job, and only this file's.

The one mistake almost everyone makes

Open any "death binder" template and it will tell you to write down your passwords, PINs, and account numbers in one place.

Don't.

A single document containing all your passwords is the most dangerous object you could create. While you're alive, it's a catastrophe waiting to leak — one photo, one synced folder, one stolen laptop and someone has everything. And it's useless anyway, because the moment you change a password, the file is wrong and you'll never remember to update it.

The fix is a change of model. Your file should be a map, not a vault.

A map doesn't hold the treasure. It tells you where the treasure is and who can open it. It says "the accounts are at this bank; the keys are in our password manager; here is the one sealed envelope that gets you into the password manager." It does not list the passwords themselves. That single shift makes the file safe to keep on the fridge, safe to leave with your executor, and — crucially — it stops rotting, because where the money is changes far less often than the password to reach it.

There is exactly one secret worth planning for carefully, and we'll come to it at the end. Everything else is a pointer.

The checklist — what to actually put in it

Order it by urgency, not by category. The survivor doesn't need your funeral playlist on day one; they need to be able to pay for groceries and stop a payment that's about to bounce. So the list runs from the first 48 hours outward.

1. The first 48 hours

The things that bite immediately if no one knows them:

• Money to live on this week — which account holds the day-to-day money, and how a trusted person reaches it (the bank, not the PIN).
• Payments that fail silently — the mortgage or rent, the insurance, anything on direct debit that causes real damage if it bounces.
• Who to tell first — your employer, your executor, the one or two people who need to know before anyone else.
• Anything time-critical and physical — animals to be fed, medication, a business that doesn't stop because you did.

2. The people

For each: their name, how to reach them, and what they hold for you. These are the people your partner can call who already know part of the picture.

• Executor (and the solicitor who holds the will)
• Accountant or tax agent
• Financial adviser, if you have one
• Your GP, and any specialist
• Anyone who holds a key, a code, or a copy of something important

3. The money map

Where it is — never the password to it.

• Bank accounts (which institution, what each is for)
• Superannuation (the fund — and note your binding death benefit nomination, which often sits outside your will)
• Shares, managed funds, the registry
• Loans, the mortgage, the offset, any debt
• Income that stops when you do — and bills that keep coming regardless

4. The documents — and where they live

You don't put the documents in the file. You put where to find them.

• The will (the signed original — where is it, physically?)
• Power of attorney and any advance care directive
• Insurance policies (life, home, car, health)
• Property deeds, the car's registration, warranties
• Birth, marriage, citizenship papers

If those are scattered across a drawer, a filing cabinet, an email account and three apps, the map has to say so honestly — that scatter is exactly the problem most households have, and naming it is half the fix.

5. The digital life

• The password manager — that it exists, which one, and the plan for the master key (see below). This is the keystone; almost everything else hangs off it.
• The primary email account — because it's the recovery route for everything else.
• Subscriptions that auto-renew (so they can be stopped) and any income tied to digital accounts.
• The phone itself, and how it's unlocked — increasingly the single most important device to be able to get into.

6. The household operations

The knowledge that exists nowhere but your head:

• Who services the heat pump, the hot water, the car — and when it was last done
• The rates, the water, the body corporate, the septic or the bins
• The wifi, the alarm code, where the water main shuts off
• The "you have to jiggle the back door" knowledge — the small operating manual of your particular house

7. Wishes and instructions

Kept brief, and kept in its lane. Your funeral or burial preferences belong here as guidance for the people who'll grieve — not as legal instruction (that's the will and any advance care directive). Say what would comfort them to know. Don't try to make this document do your solicitor's job.

The one secret: the master key

Here's the exception to "never write the secrets down."

If your whole digital life sits behind a password manager — and it should — then there is one secret that genuinely matters: the master password, plus a way into the device or account that holds it. You can't point at that one; somebody eventually has to have it.

The safe way is not to type it into the file. It's to use a real-world instrument: a sealed envelope in the safe, or with the solicitor alongside the will, that your executor opens only when the time comes. The file points at that envelope — "the key to everything is in the sealed envelope in the safe" — and the envelope holds the actual secret. Trust plus physical possession, no document full of live passwords sitting around for years.

That's the whole discipline in one example: the map on the fridge, the treasure behind a lock, and one clearly-marked key.

Free · The Household Map

Take the paper version with you.

One A4 page to fill in by hand — where things are and who to call, never the secrets themselves. We’re building the software version; leave your email and we’ll send you the map now, and one note when it’s ready.

Send me the map

No newsletter, no drip — the map now, one email when it ships. Unsubscribe any time.

The part nobody tells you: it goes stale

The reason most of these files are useless isn't that people write them badly. It's that they write them once. The file made in 2019 lists a bank you've left, a job you've changed, a fund that merged, and a password manager you hadn't adopted yet. By the time it's needed, it's a fossil.

A genuinely useful version of this needs three things the paper-binder version can't give you:

1. A date on it, so anyone reading knows how much to trust it.
2. A nudge — something that prompts you to revisit it on a sensible cadence, and especially when life changes (a new account, a house move, a retirement, a new baby, a death in the family that shifts your own executor).
3. A first-48 view that always sorts itself by urgency, so the survivor sees money and obligations first, not an undifferentiated list.

You can do all of this on paper and a calendar reminder, and if that's where you are, do it today — an out-of-date map still beats no map. But keeping it current by hand is exactly the part that fails.

What we're building for this

Keeping that map current, safe, and ready to print is the thing we're building Hovenly Continuity to do.

It holds the map and never the secrets — pointers to where things are and who to call, with the one master key kept behind a sealed envelope, exactly as above. It nudges you when an answer has gone stale. It sorts everything into a first-48 view. And it degrades to ink: at any moment it prints to a single, plain runbook your partner or executor can hold in their hands, no app, no login, no battery required. The paper is the point; the app just keeps the paper true.

Continuity is what we're building next — the runbook corner of the suite, after Larder, Papers, and Days. If this is a problem you recognise, you can reserve a founding place — you won't be charged until it's actually in your hands, and you can leave at any time. Founding members lock the founding price and help shape what gets built.

(If you'd rather read the thinking behind it than the feature list, the essay What Stays is about exactly this — the half of a household that one person holds, and what it takes to hand it over.)

---

This is a practical guide, not legal or financial advice. Your will, your power of attorney, your super nomination and your tax affairs are decisions for you and your solicitor, adviser or accountant. This file sits alongside those instruments — it doesn't replace them. Its only job is to make sure the people you trust can find and operate what you leave, on the worst week of their lives.