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Viliam_Bur comments on Open thread, July 21-27, 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Against all odds, it turns out I'm a grown-up now. If I die, go missing, or am rendered incapable of looking after myself, significant sums of money become available to my next-of-kin. I've started assembling a document for them to hold onto in case of these eventualities.
I have two questions to throw at LWers who may have dealt with this sort of thing before:
1) The whole process of making a will seems a bit excessive to my needs. I don't have a complicated estate or children or anything, and trust my next-of-kin to respect my wishes or act in my best interests if it becomes necessary. Solicitor's fees seem like an unnecessary expense. I just want to collect all the salient details into one location for convenience. Are there any good reasons why I might want to revise this judgement?
2) The basic document so far consists of a list of bank accounts, financial assets, insurance policy numbers, contact numbers for my GP, workplace, etc., and miscellaneous other details that might prove useful. Are there any sensible bits of information I might want to bundle up with this that I probably haven't thought about?
What would happen if the document gets stolen?
Identity theft and general info-sec is obviously a concern, but the way I see it, I either trust someone to safeguard these details or I don't.
I can try and minimise the chances of the document being compromised. I briefly considered some sort of encrypted flash drive business, but I figure a hard-copy subject to physical security measures is probably a lot safer than something that can be drag-and-dropped onto a Windows Vista desktop. I can also minimise the amount of personally-identifying information in the document, so anyone obtaining the document without context wouldn't know who these various assets and policies applied to.
My plan is to produce two physical documents and give them to two geographically-disparate immediate family members for safekeeping.
A safe deposit box is probably worth the cost.
It's far more expensive than the will that he felt wasn't worth paying for.
Safe deposit boxes also store a number of other documents securely, such as passports, title deeds to property, birth certificates, etc. In addition to any jewelry or whatever with large cash value, if you have any.
Nowadays most paper documents are just a convenience (or an inconvenience). What really matters is the proper entry in some database in the cloud.
Replacing a missing passport, title deed, etc. is neither hard nor expensive.
But if he has too low a net worth to make a will worthwhile, what are the odds he has anything safety-deposit-box-worthy? Spending fifty bucks a year to hold your passport seems terribly inefficient - it's not so valuable that an occasional replacement will be worse.