Life Inventory: Finances

If someone must step into your life to ensure your household keeps running, perhaps nothing could be as important as a list of your finances: where the money is and was it is for.

I started collecting this information as means of evaluating our finances, were we improving our lives or making them worse?  To this end, my list of finances included both assets (e.g. checking and savings accounts) but also retirement and debt accounts.

The list of accounts included in my financial spreadsheet includes:

Debts / obligations:

• Mortgage
• Second mortgage, HEL, HELOC, etc.
• Revolving credit (credit cards, etc.)
• Auto loans
• Medical loans
• Money that I’ve promised my kids (e.g. assistance with college)
• Other obligations

Assets:

• Checking account(s)
• Savings account(s)
• Investment account(s) (stocks, bonds, money markets, etc.)
• IRA / Roth Accounts
• 401k Accounts
• Treasury accounts
• 529 Accounts (e.g. college savings)
• Universal Gift to minors (UGTM)
• Custodial accounts
• Any other financial assets

If you intend for someone to use this information to keep your household finances running in the event that you can’t (incapacitation or death), then you need to include all of the information a person taking control of these accounts would need.  The information that I’ve included is:

Important information

• Account Name
• The purpose of the account!
• Account Company
• The type of account
• Account number
• URL
• Account username
• Account password
• Balance (positive / negative)

I do not trust including both the username and password digitally (especially on the same document!), so you should either use an electronic account vault (e.g. KeePass2) or you should put a reminder in for the password and then only write the password on the printed sheet that you pass out to your Financial Power of Attorney.

You must trust the person you assign power of attorney!