Personal Information, Documents, And Accounts To Organize And Share

By organizing your personal information, you can help your family more easily:

• Avoid unnecessary charges from ongoing subscriptions
• Protect you from identity theft or fraud
• Distribute, sell, or donate any personal items that were not included in the Will

For different types of personal identification, subscriptions, and accounts you will need to gather different types of information. Below are typical forms of personal identification, subscriptions, and accounts, and the types of documentation you should get together to be best organized.

For a printable checklist of all the documents you might need to collect, use our resource Checklist: Documents to Organize and Share.

Advance Directive

• Living Will
• Health Care Proxy
• Do Not Resuscitate (DNR)

For more information on advance health care directives, see our article Advance Health Care Directive.

Proof Of Identity And Relationships

• Social Security card
• Armed Forces discharge papers
• Birth certificate
• Death certificate
• Marriage certificates
• Divorce certificates
• Prenuptial agreements
• Postnuptial agreements
• Divorce settlements

Household Utilities

• Electricity
• Gas
• Water
• Phone
• Cable
• Internet

To gather for each utility:

• Recent copies of bills/statements
• Credit cards or bank accounts used to pay bills
• Login and password information for online account management

Automatically Renewing Medications

• Names of medications
• Name of pharmacy where medications are renewed
• Name of doctor who prescribed medication

Common Online Accounts With Passwords

Gather login and password information for each account, and the credit card information for the card associated with the account, when applicable.

Email

• Gmail
• Hotmail
• Yahoo! Mail
• AOL

Online businesses

• Amazon
• PayPal
• Ebay

Social media

• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Flickr, Picasa, or other photo-sharing sites

Automatically renewing entertainment

• Netflix, Hulu, and other online entertainment accounts
• Playstation, Xbox, or other online gaming accounts
• MLB.com, NFL.com, and other sports sites

For a printable checklist of all the documents you might need to collect, use our resource Checklist: Documents to Organize and Share.