The Postmortem Project Plan

Start with the foundational paperwork. These are the documents that prove you existed in the eyes of every bureaucracy that will need convincing. The key data points: where the originals live, and whether they're current. Expired passports do not, alas, become more useful in death.

The previous section listed the foundational documents. This one tracks where they physically live, and how to reach them. Half the failure mode of estate paperwork is documents that technically exist in some findable place that your unwitting biographer has no chance of finding. Schrödinger's birth certificate is no one's friend.

It also covers physical keys, because the most carefully labeled safe deposit box is unhelpful if the key is in a drawer no one would think to open, in a desk now being inherited by a great-niece you've never met.

This is the part where lawyers earn their fees, and they earn quite a lot of them. If any of these documents don't exist yet, that's the first thing to fix, a will costs a few hundred dollars; dying without one costs your survivors years of probate court and the faint suspicion that you didn't really care. If they do exist, the job here is just making sure the one left holding the bag knows where they are and who to call.

Every account, in one place. For each, record the institution, account number (last four is fine if you're nervous about the full number, and you should be, slightly), how it's titled, and the beneficiary. The titling and beneficiary forms are what govern who gets the money: not the will, not your obvious wishes, not what you told everyone at Thanksgiving.

Tedious section. Worth doing once carefully, so you can spend the rest of your life not doing it.

Less pleasant than the asset list, but equally necessary. Some debts die with you; others have an extended afterlife specifically designed to torment your survivors. Your forensic accountant, retroactively, will need to know which is which, and what's on autopay so it doesn't fail silently and then loudly.

For each policy: carrier, policy number, beneficiaries, agent contact, where the actual policy document lives. Life insurance through your employer or a credit card often gets forgotten, which is exactly when it pays out and gets re-remembered, by someone else, with an unpleasant amount of friction.

The deeds and titles section. How property is titled matters as much as the property itself: joint tenancy with right of survivorship passes differently than tenancy in common, a fact that has ruined many otherwise functional Thanksgivings.

What your employer owes your estate (or what your business needs to keep functioning, or be wound down with appropriate dignity, without you). The HR contact is the most useful single piece of information here: they know what every benefit pays out and exactly how slowly.

The bureaucratic surface area. Survivor benefits don't apply themselves: someone has to ask, in writing, with documentation, possibly in triplicate, occasionally notarized. Note the relevant agencies and the contacts who can help navigate them, because nobody should attempt this alone.

The newest section in any estate guide, and the one that breaks most cleanly along generational lines. The password manager is the linchpin: get that right and most other digital problems become tractable. Get it wrong and your blindsided beneficiary is locked out of nearly everything that matters, including the photo libraries containing the only evidence you ever smiled.

Your password manager has, in some practical sense, become more important than your will. A lawyer can probate a will. Nobody can probate a forgotten master password.

Most of this overlaps with the legal section, but the clinical details belong here: who treats you, for what, with what. Useful long before any worst case, too: doctors also appreciate knowing your medical history, in writing, while you're conscious.

The hardest section to write, often the most useful one to read. Specificity is a kindness here: every decision you make is one the auditor of your life choices doesn't have to make in the worst week of their life. This includes the playlist, the photos, and whether everyone should wear black or commit to a chaotic dress code.

The undocumented operational knowledge that keeps a house functioning. The garbage day. The thing about the water heater. Which neighbor has the spare key. None of this is on file anywhere, and all of it gets noticed only when it stops working, usually within forty-eight hours of you no longer being available to fix it.

One consolidated page of everyone whoever finds this document first might need to call, in roughly the order they'd need to call them. Pulled from every section above but worth having in one place: when the person opening every drawer in the house is actually using this guide, hunting through sixteen sections to find the lawyer's phone number is a deeply unhelpful experience.

Items that don't fit neatly anywhere else and routinely get forgotten, by you, and then more dramatically by anyone trying to wind down your affairs. Worth a sweep through this list once a year, ideally before any of them become posthumous treasure hunts.

The first pass is the hardest. After that, the document only needs an annual once-over. Stale information is sometimes worse than no information, at least with nothing, no one is misled into spending an afternoon calling a bank that hasn't existed since 2018.