My father surprised the hell out of everyone a couple weeks ago and passed away suddenly. In dealing with the aftermath, here's some things I recommend:
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Take care of your health now. No, really. You've got one body. Damage can be cumulative, invisible, and irreversible.
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Document your life. Accounts, vendors, contact numbers. Bank accounts, retirement accounts, investment accounts. Power, water, utilities. The Netflix password. Monthly services. Insurance policies. Most companies have a process to handle these transitions, but you need to know who to call. Having a single reference document that has a list of "this is the stuff in our lives" is just useful to have. Keep it secure, but have something put together.
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If you have dependents, have a term life insurance policy. Get a 30 year term policy in your 30s or 40s. My $1M policy is less than $50/month. My wife's is even cheaper. We've had our policies for 5+ years; that same policy now is almost 3x as expensive.
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Have a will. Have advanced health directives. Having as much as possible decided beforehand takes the burden away from people having to make hard decisions at a time when their personal bandwidth may be otherwise occupied. Let people know beforehand. Write things down.
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If you're going to register as an organ donor, someone who works with the Coroner's Office is going to call with a 30 minute questionnaire they need to go through. This call may come in the same day or the next day (as time is of the essence); anyone can answer these questions to the best of their knowledge, but be aware it's a Thing. The call can be handed off to someone else -- my mother was not prepared to talk to the nice lady about cutting out my father's eyeballs, but I took the call and got to answer questions about my father's sexual history to the best of my knowledge.
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It is bad security practice, but write down significant passwords (email, phone PIN) and keep them in a sealed envelope in your desk, or something. Unless you'd rather keep all that locked down forever, which is also fine as long as you've got Step 2 in place. If you use a password manager, keep the master password somewhere they'll find when you're gone. Or use an algorithm and let them know what it is when you're dead (like, everyone has some base password they use all the time -- just use it, and add the 2nd-4th Letter of domain( to the end, so if your reused password was "hunter2" your gmail.com password would be "hunter2Mai(" and your pizzahut.com password would be "hunter2Izz(" and your facebook password would be "hunter2Ace(").
Programmers joke about documentation all the time. But at the end of the day, the documentation is there to help the next person. If one member handles all the finances and taxes and such, leave enough information so it's easier for those you leave behind can figure out what the hell is going on -- they're going to be having a hard enough time as is.
If you're all alone, on the plus side you don't have to worry about any of this shit. So you've got that going for you. Which is nice.
Submitted February 21, 2021 at 10:58PM by fgben https://ift.tt/3aFMyga
