What to put in a digital vault first

The instinct is to start with the documents that feel most official — the passport, the deeds, the policy. That is not usually where the difficulty lies. Official documents can be re-issued, slowly and tediously, by the body that issued them. What cannot be re-issued is knowledge: which bank held the old account, which insurer the policy was with, that there is a safe deposit box at all.

So the first thing worth recording is not a document. It is a list of where things are. An index of institutions, account references and the names of people who would know more. That list is short, quick to write, and disproportionately useful.

Write down every financial relationship you can remember: current accounts, savings, pensions from old employers, insurance policies, investments, any property. You do not need account numbers or balances for this pass — the institution and roughly what it is will do.

Add the professionals: accountant, solicitor, financial adviser, insurance broker. Add anyone who holds a key, literal or otherwise — a neighbour with a spare key, a business partner, whoever administers a shared account.

This index is the single most valuable thing in most vaults, and it takes about an hour.

Some documents are gatekeepers: without them, other steps stall. Identity documents, the will if there is one, insurance policy schedules, property deeds or the tenancy agreement, and the details of any mortgage or loan.

Scan or photograph them. A clear photograph of a document is enough to tell someone what exists and where the original is kept — which is the job you are doing here. Chasing perfect scans is a good way to abandon the task.

Passwords and recovery codes, obviously — but also the informal knowledge that never gets written down. Which of the two similar-looking keys opens the shed. That the account in an old surname is still open. That a subscription renews annually on a card that will be cancelled.

Write these as plain notes attached to the relevant entry. They read as trivial while you are alive and are the difference between an afternoon and a fortnight afterwards.

Old bank statements, expired policies, historic tax returns beyond what you are required to keep, and anything already retrievable from a provider on request. Volume is not the goal. A vault with twenty well-chosen entries is more useful than one with two hundred scanned pages nobody can navigate.

You can always add more later. The failure mode is not an incomplete vault — it is an empty one, abandoned because the first session felt like a filing project.