Ninety percent of people think it’s important to discuss end-of-life plans with their loved ones – but less than 27 percent have done so. It’s easy to imagine why. Parents want to protect their children, even when they’re adults. And no matter a child’s age, it can be uncomfortable to think about major life transitions, like becoming your parents’ caretaker or administering an end-of life progression or a loved one’s estate after they are gone.
But addressing end-of-life plans can be a gift. The right information helps your loved ones make decisions based on your values and wishes. And using a digital vault to organize and share that information with your family makes life easier for you today – plus supports your family down the road.
Whether or not you are ready for the discussions, you can take the step of setting up a digital vault. Having this repository available for reference makes it easier for adult children to handle their parents’ affairs, giving them quick access to:
- Legal Documents. Wills and Trusts, social security cards, powers of attorney, and marriage license.
- Property Documents. Property deeds or leases, mortgage documents, homeowners and auto insurance policies, and vehicle title(s).
- Medical Documents. Health insurance card; HIPAA release form; life, disability, and / or long-term care insurance policies; and medical orders (e.g., DNR or POLST forms).
- Financial Documents. Tax returns, bank and credit card statements, brokerage statements, and loan documents.
Here are three ways you can use Prisidio to help relieve the pressure of having difficult conversations.
1. Share your last will and testament – and your family stories
A will isn’t just a record of who inherits your house, retirement accounts, and wedding ring. Your plans are more than that: they’re rooted in the story of your life. With Prisidio, you can share your will with those who need it – and tell the stories behind your most cherished items.
Start by creating a folder in Prisidio’s “Documents” tab. Title it, say, “Final Will and Testament.” Then, to relate items in Prisidio to that folder, follow these simple steps:
- Identify where your will is stored. Using Prisidio’s places feature, you can detail the physical location of your will, whether that’s in a safety deposit box, home safe, or your lawyer’s office. And if you’d like, you can store a digital copy of your will in the Documents section of your Prisidio vault Prisido’s documents feature
- Itemize your will’s contents. With Prisidio’s app, you can take pictures of the items listed in your will, like your house, antique chest of drawers, and heirloom necklace. Again, use the “Places” feature to relate each item’s picture to its physical location – from your grandmother’s pearls in the safety deposit box to the cherished art in your living room.
- Tell your stories. Use Prisidio’s video features to record the stories behind your cherished items when you log their location. You can even choose to narrate a video walk-through of your house, say, or a real-time itemization of your safety deposit box or offsite storage unit.
- Share your vault. Sharing this information is easy. You can add and invite someone to your vault straight from the Prisidio app. Then, you can designate the items you’d like to share with them (you may wish for a friend to have access to your emergency contacts, but give the stories about items in your will only to your children).
Being sure of where to find items can make a hard time a bit easier. But hearing the stories that connect those items to a life well-remembered can offer comfort.
When you use a digital vault, it’s simple to record these stories on the fly as you go about your daily life. (Check out our guide on putting together a smarter home inventory a little at a time.)
2. Detail account records in one place to prevent losing what’s important
Automatic payments and paperless billing make it easy to keep accounts up to date. But they also make it easy to forget key information, like passwords. And if you have a safety deposit box or insurance policy few know about, it’s a kindness to make them easy to find in your absence.
Still, it’s understandable if you want more of your family interactions to focus on fun or football – not finances.
Prisidio serves as a secure, single vault to store and access details about everything from mortgage or rent payments to utility bills – and even regular charitable donations. You can even identify a co-owner, making it even easier for the executor of your estate to access your vault when they need to.
By sharing everything in one place at your own convenience, you can lessen the awkwardness of returning to and discussing your end-of-life financial plans on multiple occasions.
3. Identify important contacts
Contacting the right people at the right time is an important part of end-of-life care. On the one hand, it’s far from the first thing on a caretaker’s mind. On the other, it’s central to tasks from empathetically notifying family, friends, and associates to canceling unnecessary subscriptions or efficiently initiating probate.
Prisidio helps make communication easier without having to sit down and discuss who to contact and when in painstaking detail. Using the “People” feature makes it easy to store and access information for:
- Emergency contacts, whether family members, personal friends, or advisors like lawyers and healthcare providers.
- Everyday contacts, including friends, neighbors, professional associates, and advisors such as accountants and insurance agents.
- Pets, including veterinary records and contact information for pet sitters or kennels.
- Places, such as workplaces, places of worship, favorite restaurants, or membership clubs.
- Social media accounts, with passwords so someone you trust can inform friends and followers, and close accounts according to your instructions.
With Prisidio’s reminders feature, you can automate notification reminders for individual contacts on a schedule you decide. And these reminders are searchable in settings, so your vault’s co-owner can easily find the most important contact information.
Prisidio helps you communicate what matters most
A digital vault can help make space to focus on the joy of living well. That’s because you don’t have to tackle the task of discussing and organizing your end-of-life plans in one sitting – or even in person.
With Prisidio, you can conveniently organize secure access to personal and sensitive information at your own pace and before it’s needed, re-orienting your time and energy toward your relationships and activities you enjoy rather than tasks.
