What your family will need to find — and where it usually isn't

The problem is not secrecy. It is that nobody wrote it down.

Most families are not kept in the dark deliberately. They simply never had a reason to ask which bank held the fixed deposit, or where the property papers went after the loan was cleared. The information existed entirely in one person's head, and then it did not.

Money

• Every bank account — bank, branch, and roughly what is in it
• Fixed and recurring deposits, including any at banks you no longer use
• Mutual funds and the folio numbers
• Demat account and broker
• EPF, PPF, NPS, gratuity
• Post office schemes — routinely forgotten
• Any money lent to someone, and any owed

Insurance

• Life policies: insurer, policy number, sum assured, nominee
• Health policies, and whether the family remains covered after your death
• Vehicle and home insurance
• Any employer-provided cover — often the largest policy a person has, and the one the family never knew existed

Property and physical things

• Sale deeds, registry papers, allotment letters
• Where the physical originals actually are — a locker, the bank that held the loan, a relative's house
• Locker details, and who is authorised to open it
• Vehicle RC and loan closure documents
• Gold and valuables, and where they are kept

Digital

• Phone and laptop passcodes — without these much of the rest is unreachable
• Primary email account, which is the recovery route for nearly everything else
• Crypto: wallet, seed phrase. No seed phrase means the value is simply gone.
• Subscriptions that keep charging, and domains or business accounts that lapse

Documents themselves

• Aadhaar, PAN, passport
• The will — and where the signed original is
• Nomination records
• Marriage certificate, birth certificates
• Loan documents, and proof of any loan closed

The three that are almost always missing

The phone passcode. Everything else — OTPs, email, banking apps — sits behind it.

Where the physical originals are. Families often know a property exists and cannot find the deed.

The full list of institutions. Not the balances — just which banks, which insurers, which funds. Without the list, there is nothing to claim from.

Do this in one sitting

You do not need a lawyer for this part, and you do not need to finish it perfectly. Write the list. Say where the originals are. Make sure one person you trust knows how to reach it.

An afternoon now is worth months later, and the months come at the worst time your family will ever have.

Where SafeNominee fits

This checklist is the product, essentially. SafeNominee is a place to keep all of it encrypted, with the people who should receive it named in advance, so that the list exists somewhere other than your memory. See how it works.