The Plainspeak / Family

Family · 5 min

The peace of mind planner

Everything your family would need, in one place: nominees, papers, passwords, the one-page map.

By 37xBetter · Last reviewed August 2026

A will you never wrote, a nominee you never updated, a password your spouse cannot find: this is how a careful life becomes a mess for the people you were being careful for. For most families, if something happened tomorrow, nobody would know where everything is, and the result is months of stress and, sometimes, money that is never claimed. Peace of mind is not a feeling. It is a file. Here is what goes in it.

The one-page map: what to write down

On a single sheet, or one secure document, record where each of these lives. Not the passwords themselves, the place they are kept.

• Your will: whether it exists, where the original is kept, its date, and who the executor is.
• Identity documents: PAN, Aadhaar, passport, voter ID, driving licence, and the birth and marriage certificates, and where each original sits.
• The people to call: spouse, a financial planner, your CA, a lawyer, the insurance agent, the family doctor, one or two trusted friends.
• Bank accounts: each bank and account number, the branch, the nominee, and where the net-banking login is kept.
• Loans: lender, account number, EMI, tenure left, and whether the loan carries its own insurance.
• Investments: demat and mutual-fund folios, EPF and UAN, PPF, NPS, with nominees against each.
• Insurance: every term and health policy, the insurer, the sum assured, and the nominee.
• A letter to your family: a few lines of reassurance and instruction. It matters more than any account number.

Fill it in once, over a few evenings, not in a day. Then tell one person you trust where it lives. A notebook in a drawer beats a clever system nobody can open.

Nominees are not a will

A nominee on a bank account or mutual fund is a custodian who receives the asset, not always its legal owner. Your will decides who finally inherits. If the intended heir differs from the nominee, or you have children from more than one household, you need a will. It does not have to be elaborate. It has to exist, be signed correctly, and be findable. Nominees and a will work together, so keep both current.

Keep it secure

This record is powerful precisely because it gathers sensitive information in one place, which also makes it sensitive. Keep it physically secure, in a locker or a safe. Do not email it or drop it in a plain cloud folder. Where you can, write where a password is kept, for example "in my password manager", rather than the password itself. And review it once a year, and after any big change, a new account, a loan, a policy, or a move.

The two policies that actually protect

Pure term cover, sized to income replacement plus debts, and a health policy of your own, because the office cover disappears the day the job does. Everything else, endowment, ULIP, "guaranteed" income plans, is a separate decision, and usually a worse one.