I am currently dealing with my father's estate and I can say that deeds etc will not be useful. It's really easy for your spouse/executor/whoever to access anyt

I am currently dealing with my father's estate and I can say that deeds etc will not be useful. It's really easy for your spouse/executor/whoever to access anything like that if need be with a letter with a copy of the death cert and will. A list of your accounts, life insurance, pension policies etc would on the other hand be very useful, so they know who to write to. I just had to sort through 300 pages or so of stuff going back 30+ years to try to figure this out. The most useful things you can do are: - Make an expression of wishes to tell your pension/life insurance provider what to do with your money. This might be a UK thing, but here your pension does not form part of your estate and therefore isn't governed by your will. So if you die without filling out this BS little form, the trustees of the pension can in theory divide up your pension in a way you don't like. Even if you have filled out an expression of wishes they can do this but it's more susceptible to legal challenge if they do. - If you are married or in a similar long-term partnership with someone, put as much of your finances as possible into joint accounts and in particular have your regular bill payments etc work through a joint account. Your bank will freeze any individual accounts until the probate is granted and your family can be left in a difficult position of trying to figure out what all the bills are that are going to fail to pay because your account has been frozen and they have no access. Them having your online passwords won't help because the online access will be shut off. - Put an emergency fund into a savings account that your spouse/child whatever can access. Ideally enough for your dependents to live on for a couple of months plus handle a couple of chunky bills. It can be one of those savings accounts that only allows one access per year or something but they need to be able to get their hands on this cash quick. We're just setting this up for our child after seeing how it played out for my Dad. Say you have one child and you and your spouse suddenly die in a car cash or something. Believe it or not your accounts (including all joint accounts) will be instantly frozen and there will be a period before matters get resolved when your child will have no access to money at all. There are ways around this predicament but you wouldn't want to put your families through that if they're already dealing with the fact of your death as well.