How organised are you with life admin / important paperwork?

[NanaStrikesAgain]

I’m curious about how organised others are with important paperwork at home? Where do you keep the important stuff like Wills, POA, passports, passwords and bank/ money info - basically anything that people would need to know or find if you were to become suddenly seriously ill or die?

We haven’t been very organised and all these things are stored in various places which myself and my husband know about, but it’s occurred to me recently that at some point our kids will need to sort out our affairs - hopefully not for a long time, but realistically no-one knows what the future holds!

My husband doesn’t share my desire to get all this sorted and more organised asap. He thinks most people are slack with admin. He’s also worried about having all our important information in one place that could be easily stolen.

So I’m curious how what others have / haven’t done?

I have a filing cabinet but it’s a mess. All documents are there though so slightly easier to locate.

We have a file box with everything important in it including passwords. Our children know where it is and it's updated every time a change is made be that a new passport or a different password. Very organised!

We have spreadsheets, all password protected, which detail all our accounts and investments etc. Both dcs know the passwords should anything happen to us.

Fire proof Safe deposit box with the originals of poa/wills/insurance/pensions/marriage and death certs and copies of drivers licence etc etc.
Financial stuff is lodged with the finance advisor and copies of deeds, will and poa with solicitor.

Filing cabinet. I was off sick after surgery once and set it all up. I even labelled the tabs 🤣 I cull it every 18 months or so. TBH not so much paper work is required these days due to online. The main documents are the 50,000 things related to home ownership.

I then have a basket which I put things in that need to go in the filing cabinet. Once the basket is full (or has been for a while ....) I decamp it into the filing cabinet.

Passwords all in my head! Everything else in filing cabinet. No clue re my other half s stuff. I asked him for his bank pin number but never got it. Need to write wills etc. I know we have life insurance death in service pensions etc but no idea how I would find out about them if he went suddenly. My friend committed suicide last week and his wife has no idea if there is any insurance or anything.

I have a Filofax which keeps all my docs in

Filing cabinet filled with cardboard folders, all labelled i.e official documents, house, pension, car etc

All the key docs are filed so shouldn’t be that hard to find. I have a will.

My day to day admin on the other hand.. 😱

I have 3 box files - 'Cars, family, house'. It works.

Filing cabinet.

Mixture of physical hard copy records and online. We have the same swipe codes for our phones so if anything happened to me he can get into my phone and access anything else required, bar bank accounts, but we are married so he will get it anyway.