The estate planning checklist: 10 things to organise before you need to
1 August 2026 · Inherit Vault
Estate planning sounds like a single daunting project. In practice it's about ten separate, small tasks, most doable in an evening, and almost nobody does all ten, which is exactly why executors spend months reconstructing what a checklist would have taken an hour to write down.
1. Write a will
Without one, intestacy rules decide who inherits, not you, and the results often surprise people who assumed "it all goes to my partner" by default.
2. Name your executor, and tell them
The role carries real legal duties and personal liability, someone who doesn't know they've been chosen finds out at the worst possible time.
3. Choose where the will lives
A solicitor's safe, the Probate Service's storage, or the National Will Register, anywhere findable. A will nobody can locate is legally close to no will at all.
4. List every bank and savings account
Not balances, just which institutions hold your money. Unclaimed UK accounts run into billions, almost always because nobody knew they existed.
5. List every pension
Pensions sit outside your will entirely, paid out via an expression-of-wish form most people complete once and forget. Old workplace pensions from decades-old jobs are the easiest ones to lose entirely.
6. Note your life insurance policies, and whether they're in trust
A policy in trust can pay out in weeks, bypassing probate. One that isn't gets swept into the estate, and delayed with it.
7. Record your digital accounts and what you want done with them
Not the passwords, sharing those can breach a platform's terms, just what exists and your wishes: memorialised, deleted, or handed over via each platform's own legacy tools.
8. Note any crypto holdings, precisely
Self-custody crypto has no bereavement department to call, if the keys are lost, the coins are gone permanently, no exceptions, no appeals.
9. Set your executor visibility preferences
Decide what your executor should be able to see, and when, while you're alive versus only after you're gone.
10. Tell your family the plan exists
The best-organised estate still fails if nobody knows where to look for it. One conversation, "if anything happens to me, here's where the information is," closes the loop every other item on this list depends on.
Ten items, most under an hour. Inherit Vault holds items 3 through 9 in one encrypted place, built to be found exactly once, by exactly the right person, at exactly the right time.
Leave your family a map, not a mystery.
Inherit Vault is the UK's digital inheritance vault: every account, policy, and instruction your family will need, encrypted so only you can read it, released to your executor when it genuinely matters.
More articles
- What happens to Premium Bonds, ISAs and other savings when you die (UK)
- Password manager or digital inheritance vault: what's the difference?
- What happens to your online shop, blog or side hustle when you die
- What happens to your Facebook, Instagram and other accounts when you die
- How much does it cost to sort out someone's estate? (UK, 2026)