After DH died, I wrote a FB post with a (LONG) series of bullet points of things that couples should be thinking about and preparing for in case something happens to one of them. It wasn't just the obvious stuff (know where the accounts are) but things like "don't share a single logon to joint accounts, because if it's tied to the deceased spouse, it may get locked."
It got a ton of positive reaction, especially given that at our age there haven't been a lot of spouse losses yet.
But I'm sure a lot of friends had read many of the pieces of advice before--but it took a very close-to-home loss and a piece written by someone they know (and trust?) for them to start paying attention.
I was "lucky" to be the one in our house who really knew where all the accounts were, and to have been paying attention to sites like this one before DH died. So while it was a ton of work, I knew what to do. But that's not always the case.
And, what the heck, here it is. I see it was written two months after he died.
Today I'm not writing about DH, or us, or my latest adventures in grieving (such as how the installation of a new back door here at the Bunker of Grief sent me into a 36-hour spiral as I realized it was the first real change to "our" house that he will never see).
Instead, I wish to drone on about:
Paperwork.
We are very long past the days of a widow basically being patted on the head and handed a checkbook, a savings passbook, maybe some bonds in a safe deposit box, and the phone numbers for her husband's pension company and Social Security. Or a widower not having to worry about any of his wife's financial holdings, because of course the little lady wouldn't possibly have had any of her own.
If you keep scrolling, you will find an offputtingly long list of items, every one of which I have come across in some way in the past few months. (See, it turns out that I *have* been doing more than just than crying into a box of bon-bons while camped on the sofa watching ER and Law and Order.)
It should not surprise you that The Prophet of Doom had almost all of this under control well before DH got sick (MUST PREPARE MUST PLAN MUST ORGANIZE MUST BE READY), and so I thankfully have not had to be starting from scratch at the time when I am the least capable of doing so. And I still have spent untold hours during these weeks on phone calls and paperwork, and have still run into roadblocks I didn't expect.
If you find yourself thinking, "Well, at least if either my partner or myself is diagnosed with a possibly terminal disease, we will have time to sort these things out," let me try to not laugh as I say that, when fighting a possibly terminal disease, the last thing you will probably want to spend much time on is talking about how the survivor will handle everything "afterward." It was also a huge weight off of me during DH's illness to know that we had already dealt with the most complex portions of this stuff. I can't imagine what it would have been like to have had that tossed into the mix as well. I assume it just wouldn't have gotten done.
And even then, not everything was tied up neatly. DH and I both relied on password managers that store all of our passwords in a secure location (LastPass, in our case), but by the time I felt like I could make the emotionally fraught request for his master password, I found out he was incapable of correctly telling it to me (thanks, morphine). (Which made the fact that we had also come up with an In-Case-of-Emergency-Break-Glass setup to get each other's master password an incredibly helpful thing.)
We had done all of our planning with an estate attorney, and have used a tax accountant for a number of years too, so I have not one but two people holding my hands through the very involved process that is nowhere near close to finished. It's already worth every penny. But they don't do it all, and you don't get to just have everything automatically become yours because you're the spouse.
If reading the way-too-long list of bullet points below leaves you nauseous, well, my work is done.
And, for the heck of it, I wrote it in the format of a handy questionnaire, geared toward couples but also of use for anyone, just in case you haven't been immersed in this stuff previously in some way and find yourself wanting to do a little bit of prior planning in order to avoid nasty surprises--and probate--in as many situations as possible. Not that I'm telling you that you should. I would never presume to tell anyone to DO AS MUCH OF THIS AS POSSIBLE NOW. RIGHT NOW. BEFORE IT BECOMES AN EMERGENCY. I just wouldn't do that.
Here's the bullet points, should you dare, while granting that DH and I did have a fairly convoluted yours/mine/ours approach to household finance:
* Have you written your wills/trusts? Are they relatively up-to-date? Did you use an estate attorney?
* Do you each know where all of the household bank accounts are held? Are they all jointly owned, or are there individual ones you aren't co-owners of? Do you each have your own online access to the joint accounts, rather than sharing a single sign-on? Because once banks get the word from Social Security about a death, some can be pretty quick to freeze the access of the deceased. So if you just share a username tied to the deceased's SSN, it might get shut down and require some hassle to get re-enabled. Get your own to be sure (and even then online access might still get disabled and require a phone call or two to fix). And no, banks really don't like it if you just go in and take money out of the deceased's solely owned accounts until they give it to you legally.
* Have you figured out which accounts allow for "Transfer on Death" or the namings of beneficiaries, and have you properly filled that information out?
* Is your house owned jointly, as tenants in the entirety or as joint tenants with rights of survivorship? Do you both know which bank holds your mortgage? Are you co-borrowers? How does it get paid? (auto pay? check? bags of pennies handed to the teller?) Do you each have your own online access to the account?
* Do you both know about whether there's any home equity loans/lines of credit/other loans, and where those might be? Are they owned jointly? Do you each have your own online access to them?
* Do you both know about any and all IRA accounts? Have you entered beneficiaries for each one?
* Do you both know about any and all non-IRA non-401k brokerage accounts? Are they owned jointly, which means that the monies are equally available to both of you even when one of you dies? Do you each have your own online access to them? If they are not owned jointly and you don't wish to change that for whatever reason, is there at least a Transfer on Death/Beneficiary election done?
* Do you both know how the household credit cards get paid? What about any cards that your partner holds only in their name? You're going to be required to make a list pretty quickly of all of your partner's assets and liabilities, and it will include all credit cards, loans, brokerage accounts, cars, etc., both jointly and solely held.
* Do you both know how the taxes get prepared? Can you easily put your hands on the past few years of your returns? (The returns also might help you if you don't know the answers to some of the above questions.)
* Do you both know how the utilities get paid? And this doesn't include just water/sewer/gas/electric -- what about cable? Internet? Phone? Are both names on the accounts? Do you each have your own online access to them? (Some utilities go to Occupant, technically, and so don't really care about who is paying them until they hear of a change in the house's title. Then they want to know.)
* For anything where you answered "Auto pay," do you personally have access to the logon information for both the account where the payments come from and the mortgage/utility/credit card account being paid? (Even with jointly owned checking accounts, sometimes if auto pays are set up by one account holder, the other one can't see those under their own login.)
* Is there life insurance? Do you both know how to get to it? (and if there isn't life insurance, is it time to get some?)
* Do you know about each other's pensions, if any? I know, this is so old-fashioned, but there are still some out there. (If there are 401(k)s, it's the law that the spouse be beneficiary unless that right is signed away by notarized form, and your spouse's HR department will help you with the 401(k) stuff, the pension stuff, and any company-provided life insurance, so that's one small piece of assistance awaiting you.)
* Are you each able to get into your partner's computer? Do you know their desktop/laptop passwords? If you aren't comfortable sharing that info now, do you at least have some way for your partner to find out the passwords in case of emergency? (even just a vaguely marked sealed envelope in a VERY safe place can work)
* Are you each able to get into your partner's e-mail in case of emergency, which (putting aside the privacy concerns) will be a huge source of information about accounts, payments, two-factor codes, etc.?
* Are you each able to get into your partner's cellphone, where two-factor authentication texts or codes are found when you try to get into important accounts with their login information? And where there might be a whole lot of photos that you want?
* Are you each able to get into your partner's iAppleCloud-y stuff, Snapagrams, Twitbooks, and the various other social media accounts? Blogs? Tumblrs? (As you can imagine, this was a big one in our household. It took me, a learned master of such things, more than a week to figure out how to log in to DH's Blogspot account.)
* Do you know where the titles to your cars are?
* Do you have all necessary powers of attorney for each other? Do you have living wills? Do you know your partner's wishes about "end of life issues"?
* Do you know what sort of funeral/memorial service your partner might want? Do you know where your partner (and you) want to be buried?
* Do you have access to enough liquid reserves to pay what needs to be paid (funeral, cemetery, etc) while figuring all of this stuff out? I am eight weeks out and have only just started receiving payouts for things I wasn't a joint holder of.
* Are you still reading? If so, I commend you, and I apologize.
EDITED TO ADD EVEN MORE BULLET POINTS:
* Do you and your partner use password managers? If yes, yay. If no, start. Now. Do you have a way for each other to find out the master password to the manager accounts? (These programs can do a lot of the work of getting into your partner's social media accounts, financial accounts, etc., if properly maintained, but are also just good computer hygiene these days.)
* Do you have 529 college savings accounts? If yours allow it, the current owner of the accounts should name a successor owner.
* Hopefully you know where both of your birth certificates and Social Security numbers are, but what about a certified copy of your marriage certificate? They are generally easy to request (especially if yours is held by the clerk of Clark Co., Nevada
), but it takes a week or so to get one by mail after ordering and so wouldn't hurt to have one or two on hand in case you have to prove you were truly married.
I just thought of another bullet point:
* Do either of you own any web sites? Do you know where they are hosted, and how to update the content? Do you know where the URLs are registered, and have access to the owner account to be able to renew them before they expire? (I had to renew the somewhat important address of DH's site about 10 days after DH died, plus I had to figure out how pages on his site get edited, to post the announcement of his passing. His Password Manger got me into all necessary locations.)
