When somebody dies, the person handling the estate — the executor, or the estate trustee, or the personal representative, depending where you live — starts from almost nothing. They have a name, a death certificate, and a house full of drawers. Everything else, they have to discover.
That discovery is where the months go. Not the legal work; the archaeology. Which bank held the chequing account. Whether there was a second life insurance policy from an old employer. Where the deed is. Whether the parent who just died had already paid for a plot. Whose email address the digital photos are attached to. Each unanswered question is a phone call, a wait on hold, a form, and another two weeks.
A letter of instruction — sometimes called a letter of last instruction, an estate map, or an in-case-of-death file — is the document that removes that archaeology. It is not a will. It is not legally binding, and it should not try to be. It is simply a written answer to one question: if I were not here to ask, where would my family find everything?
This page is the complete list of what belongs in it.
The ten sections
How to use this page. You do not have to do all ten in one sitting, and a half-finished letter is worth far more than a perfect one you never start. Work down the list in order — the first four are the ones that cost families the most time when they are missing.
Bank and investment accounts — and which institution holds each one
Start with the plainest possible inventory. For every account you hold, write down four things: what it is, who holds it, roughly what is in it, and whether anyone else is on it.
Cover all of it, not just the big balances:
- Chequing and savings accounts, including the dormant one you opened for a mortgage and never closed
- Registered and tax-advantaged accounts — in Canada, RRSPs, TFSAs, RESPs, RRIFs, LIRAs; in the US, 401(k)s, IRAs, Roth IRAs, 529 plans
- Non-registered brokerage and investment accounts
- Workplace pensions, including from employers you left decades ago
- Employee share plans, stock options and deferred compensation
- Business accounts, if you own or co-own anything
- Crypto holdings and the exchange or wallet they sit in
- Prepaid cards, store credit, loyalty points with real cash value, and any foreign accounts
Note joint ownership explicitly. An account held jointly with a right of survivorship usually passes straight to the other owner and never touches the estate; an account in your name alone does not. Your family cannot tell the difference from a statement, and guessing wrong sends them down the wrong path for weeks.
What happens when this is missing: the executor works backwards from your mail and your tax return, which only reveals accounts that generated a slip or a statement in the last year. Small, dormant and paperless accounts are simply never found. In Canada those balances eventually transfer to the Bank of Canada as unclaimed; in the US they escheat to the state. The money is not lost forever, but nobody in your family will ever know to go looking for it.
Do this: open your banking app and your email, search your inbox for "statement" and "e-statement", and list every institution that comes back. That single search usually surfaces two or three accounts people forget they have.
Beneficiary designations — and when you last checked them
This is the item most people skip, and it is the one that causes the most damage. Certain assets do not pass under your will at all. They pass to whoever is named on the account paperwork: life insurance, registered and retirement accounts, pensions, and in some places transfer-on-death arrangements.
That named person wins. If your will leaves everything to your current spouse but a twenty-year-old form on a retirement account still names an ex-partner, the form generally decides — and the family finds out at the worst possible moment.
So for each account that carries a designation, write down who is named, and the date you last confirmed it. The date matters as much as the name.
What happens when this is missing: the mismatch surfaces months in, after the estate has been distributed on an assumption. Undoing it is expensive, slow, and it is the single most common source of families falling out over money. Where no beneficiary is named at all, the asset falls into the estate — which in many cases means probate fees and delay it did not need to face.
Do this: log in to each retirement, pension and insurance account and read the beneficiary field with your own eyes. Do not rely on memory of what you filled in when you opened it. Marriages, separations and new children rarely update themselves.
Property, vehicles and where the deeds are
List everything that has a title or a registration attached to it, and say where the paperwork lives:
- Your home — the address, how it is owned (sole, joint tenants, tenants in common), the mortgage lender, and where the deed or title document is held
- Rental or recreational property, including anything held with siblings or in a family arrangement
- Land or property in another province, state or country — this one is important, because property abroad often needs its own separate estate process in that jurisdiction
- Vehicles, boats, trailers and their registration documents
- A storage unit, and which company and which unit number
- A safe deposit box, which bank, which branch, and where the key is
- High-value personal items with paperwork behind them — jewellery appraisals, art provenance, collections
How a property is held changes what happens to it, so write it down plainly. Joint tenants with a right of survivorship generally means the surviving owner keeps it. Tenants in common means your share goes into your estate. These sound alike and behave completely differently.
What happens when this is missing: the family knows about the house. They do not know about the quarter-share of a cottage, the storage unit quietly billing a credit card, or the safe deposit box nobody has a key for. Property held in another jurisdiction discovered late can add a year to an estate, because a second legal process has to start from scratch.
Do this: if you cannot say right now where your deed or title document physically is, that is the sentence to write down first — even if the answer is "I don't know". A known gap is useful. An invisible one is not.
Insurance policies, including the ones through work
Insurance is the category families most often under-claim, because a policy nobody knows about is a policy nobody claims. Write down the insurer, the policy number, roughly what it pays, and who is named on it, for each of:
- Life insurance you bought yourself
- Group life through your employer — routinely forgotten, and often one to two years of salary
- Mortgage life insurance sold by your lender, which pays the lender rather than your family and so is easy to overlook entirely
- Credit card or loan balance insurance, same reason
- Life cover attached to a professional association, union, alumni group or club membership
- Critical illness, disability and long-term care policies
- Home, auto and umbrella liability policies — the estate still has to keep these alive while it is being settled
- Travel or accidental death cover bundled into a credit card
- Any prepaid funeral plan or funeral insurance
What happens when this is missing: nothing happens. Insurers do not know you have died and they do not hunt for beneficiaries; a claim has to be made. Unclaimed benefits sit indefinitely. The employer policy is the classic one — the family notifies the payroll department about the final paycheque, nobody mentions the life cover, and it is simply never claimed.
Do this: check your employee benefits portal for a "life insurance" or "group benefits" line, and check whether your mortgage statement includes a monthly insurance charge. Those two checks take ten minutes and find most of the hidden cover.
Debts, bills and everything on auto-pay
Debts do not disappear when you do — they are settled out of the estate before anything is distributed. An executor who does not know what is owed cannot close the estate safely, and in many places can be held personally responsible for distributing money that should have paid a creditor.
Write down every obligation and every recurring payment:
- Mortgages and home equity lines of credit
- Credit cards and lines of credit — every card, including the one used only for points
- Car loans and leases
- Student loans, personal loans and any money borrowed from family
- Taxes you expect to owe, and whether you make instalment payments
- Utilities, property tax, condo or HOA fees, insurance premiums — what they are and which account pays them
- Subscriptions on auto-renew, from streaming services to software to the gym
- Anything you have personally guaranteed for someone else, including for a business
- Money owed to you — a loan to a relative, a deposit held by a landlord, an outstanding invoice
What happens when this is missing: two failures at once. Bills nobody knew about go unpaid and become defaults on the estate. And auto-payments nobody knew about keep draining an account for months — sometimes long enough to push it negative — because they are attached to a card the family has not thought to cancel. Debts owed to you are almost never collected, because only you knew they existed.
Do this: pull the last three months of statements for whichever account most bills come out of and list every recurring line item. That statement is the most complete picture of your obligations that exists anywhere.
Digital accounts — and how to reach them without writing down passwords
Your digital life is now a real part of your estate, and it is the part most likely to be permanently lost. The rule here is important and counter-intuitive:
Do not write live passwords into this document. It will sit in a drawer for years, be photocopied, get emailed, and go out of date within weeks. A list of stale passwords is a security problem that solves nothing.
Instead, write down what exists and how to get in — which is a different thing entirely.
List the accounts that matter, and for each one say what should happen to it:
- Your primary email — the master key, because password resets for everything else flow through it
- Your phone, and its passcode or how to unlock it, since so much two-factor authentication lands there
- Photo storage and cloud drives, which usually hold the only copies of family photographs
- Social media accounts, and whether you want each one memorialised, closed, or left alone
- Online banking and investment logins
- Subscription and shopping accounts with cards attached
- Domain names, websites, online shops, or any account that earns money
- Crypto wallets and their recovery phrases — stored securely and separately, never in this document
- Loyalty and airline points programs, some of which can be transferred and many of which cannot
The mechanism that actually works
Use a password manager for your credentials, and set up its emergency access feature — most of the major ones let you nominate a trusted person who can request access after a delay you choose. Then your letter of instruction only has to say one sentence: which password manager you use, and who has emergency access.
Both Google and Apple offer their own versions of this — an inactive account manager and a legacy contact respectively. Setting those up takes a few minutes each and covers the two accounts most likely to hold your photographs.
What happens when this is missing: the family is locked out permanently. Platform providers will not hand over an account to someone who cannot authenticate, and in many cases their terms do not allow it even with a death certificate. Photographs are the loss people grieve hardest — a decade of family pictures behind an email address nobody can open.
Do this: set up emergency access on your password manager, or a legacy contact on your phone, today. It is the single highest-value fifteen minutes in this entire list.
The people to call — and what each one already knows
Your family will need a phone list, and it should say more than names. For each person, note what they handle and roughly what they already have on file, because "our lawyer has a copy of the will" is worth more than a phone number alone.
- Your executor, and your alternate executor — and confirm they have actually agreed to do it
- The lawyer or notary who prepared your will, and whether they hold the original
- Your accountant or whoever files your tax return
- Your financial advisor or planner, and which accounts they oversee
- Your insurance broker or agent
- Your employer's HR or benefits contact, for final pay, pension and group cover
- Your family doctor
- Anyone holding a power of attorney for property or for personal care
- A business partner, co-owner or anyone with signing authority on something of yours
- Your landlord or your tenants
- The handful of friends and relatives who should be told directly rather than finding out second-hand
Two extra notes are worth adding: who among these people already has copies of your documents, and anything you have already discussed with them that is not written down anywhere.
What happens when this is missing: the executor rebuilds your professional network from scratch, out of your email and your billing history, while grieving. Advisors and lawyers cannot ring in — they usually will not even know you have died until someone tells them. Months of avoidable delay come from nothing more than not knowing who to call.
Do this: tell your executor they are your executor, if you have not already. Being named in a will is not the same as being told, and an executor who first learns of the job at the funeral starts a long way behind.
Where the will physically is
This is one line, and it may be the most valuable line in the whole document. Write down where the original signed will is kept — not a copy, the original — and who else knows.
Include, if they exist:
- The original will, and whether the lawyer or a court registry holds it
- Any codicil or amendment, and its date
- Trust documents
- Powers of attorney for property and for personal care
- A living will, advance directive or healthcare proxy — this one needs to be findable in hours, not weeks, because it is needed while you are still alive
- Marriage certificate, divorce or separation agreement, prenuptial or cohabitation agreement
- Birth certificate, passport, citizenship or immigration papers, Social Insurance or Social Security number
- Recent tax returns, and where the older ones are
- Any deed, share certificate or bond that exists only on paper
A warning about safe deposit boxes. Storing the only original will in a safe deposit box is a well-known trap. In many places the box is sealed on death, and opening it requires the estate authority that the will itself is needed to obtain. If your will is in a box, make sure someone can get into that box, or keep the original elsewhere.
What happens when this is missing: a will that cannot be found is, in practice, a will that does not exist. The estate is then distributed under a default legal formula that has never met your family and will not match your intentions. Everything you paid a lawyer for evaporates over a filing-cabinet mystery.
Do this: write the location down in one specific sentence — building, room, piece of furniture, drawer. "In the house somewhere" is not a location.
Funeral and final wishes
Funeral decisions get made in the first forty-eight hours, before anyone has read the will and long before an estate account exists. If your wishes are not written somewhere obvious and reachable immediately, they will not be followed — not out of disregard, but because nobody knew.
Write down whatever you actually have a view on, and say plainly where you do not mind:
- Burial or cremation, and anything you feel strongly about either way
- Whether a plot, a niche or a funeral plan is already bought and paid for — and where that paperwork is
- Which funeral home, if you have a preference
- The kind of service you want, or that you would rather not have one
- Organ and tissue donation, and whether you have registered
- Readings, music, or anything that matters to you about the day
- Where you would like ashes to go
- Whether there is an obituary you want written, or one you would rather they skip
- Anything about religion or ceremony your family might not assume correctly
Say what you do not care about too. "I have no strong feelings about the service — do whatever is easiest for you" is a genuine gift. It removes a decision that people otherwise agonise over on the worst week of their lives.
What happens when this is missing: your family guesses, spends more than you would have wanted because nobody wants to look cheap at a funeral, and quietly argues about what you would have preferred. A prepaid plan nobody knows about gets paid for twice.
Do this: keep this section reachable in the first hour, not sealed with the will. Funeral wishes buried in a lawyer's file are read a week too late.
Dependants, pets, and the things only you know
The last section is the one no checklist can write for you: the operating knowledge of your own life that exists nowhere but in your head.
- Children — who you have named as guardian, and anything about schools, routines, medical needs or support arrangements
- Anyone who depends on you — an ageing parent, an adult child, someone you quietly support each month, and how that support actually flows
- Pets — who takes them, the vet, medications, food, temperament, and any money you want set aside for their care
- The house — where the water shut-off is, which contractor knows the furnace, which key opens what, what the alarm code is and who monitors it
- Ongoing commitments — a lease you signed, a promise you made, a board you sit on, a project someone is waiting on
- Anything a document cannot say — the reasoning behind a decision that may look unfair without explanation, or simply a letter to the people you love
That last one is worth pausing on. If you have left one person more than another, or made a choice that will raise a question, a paragraph explaining why prevents an argument that no legal document can. It is not binding, and it does not need to be. It just needs to exist in your own words.
What happens when this is missing: the practical knowledge is rebuilt at cost — a locksmith instead of a key, a new contractor instead of the one who knows the building. And unexplained decisions become the story the family tells itself for years.
Do this: write one paragraph in your own voice at the end. It is the part your family will actually reread.
Where to keep it, and who to tell
A perfect letter of instruction that nobody can find has achieved nothing. Three rules cover it:
- Reachable without a court order. A home fireproof box, a sealed envelope kept with the will, or a copy held directly by your executor all work. A safe deposit box, on its own, often does not — see the warning above.
- Somebody knows where it is. At minimum your executor, and ideally one other person. Telling two people costs nothing and removes the single point of failure.
- Dated, with the old copies destroyed. Put the date on the front page. If there are two versions in circulation and nobody can tell which is current, your family has to decide which one to trust — which is exactly the problem you were solving.
If you keep a digital copy, keep a printed one as well. The family may not be able to open the device.
How often to update it
Once a year, as a habit — many people attach it to tax season or a birthday so it does not need remembering. And immediately after anything that changes the underlying facts: a marriage or separation, a birth, a death in the family, a house move, a new mortgage, a job change, a new account, a change of executor, or a serious diagnosis.
Updating is much faster than writing. The first version is the hard one.
Five mistakes that make an otherwise good letter useless
- Writing live passwords into it. They expire, and the document does not. Point at a password manager instead.
- Trying to give away possessions in it. A letter of instruction is not a will and cannot override one. Gifts you want honoured belong in the will. Putting them here creates a contradiction that causes exactly the dispute you were trying to prevent.
- Locking it where only a court can reach it. Accessibility beats security here, within reason.
- Telling nobody it exists. The most common failure of all. Documents found while clearing out a house are found months too late.
- Waiting until it is complete. A one-page version listing your bank, your insurer, your executor and where the will is already puts your family months ahead. Start there and add to it.
This page is general information about organising your own records. It is not legal, tax or financial advice, and it does not create a will, a trust or a power of attorney. Rules differ between provinces, states and countries — particularly around probate, beneficiary designations and property held jointly. For anything that has to be legally binding, use a qualified lawyer or notary where you live.
Common questions
Is a letter of instruction legally binding?
No, and it should not try to be. It does not decide who inherits what, and it cannot override a will, a trust or a beneficiary designation. Its job is to tell the people you leave behind what exists and where to find it. Anything you want to be legally binding belongs in a will, prepared with a lawyer.
What is the difference between a will and a letter of instruction?
A will says who gets what. A letter of instruction says where everything is. A will is a formal legal document with witnessing rules and a cost attached; a letter of instruction is a plain document you write yourself and can update any time. Most families need both — a will without a letter of instruction leaves the executor searching for the very assets the will is supposed to distribute.
Do I still need one if I already have a will?
Yes, and arguably more so. A will is only useful once someone has found it and knows what it covers. Everything in this page sits outside the will: locations, account lists, insurers, passwords, contacts, funeral wishes. None of that belongs in a will, and none of it is anywhere else either.
Should I put passwords in it?
No. Name each account, say what it is for, and point to where the credentials live — a password manager, and who holds emergency access to it. Then set that emergency access up while you are alive. A written password list goes stale within weeks and is a security risk for as long as it exists.
Where should I keep it?
Somewhere your executor can reach without a court order, and somewhere at least two people know about. A safe deposit box is often the wrong choice, because in many places the box is sealed on death and opening it needs the very authority your documents were meant to support.
How long does it take to write one?
A useful first version takes an evening. A thorough one takes a few sittings, mostly because of the looking-things-up rather than the writing. The accounts and insurance sections are where the time goes; funeral wishes and contacts are quick.
Does this work the same in Canada and the United States?
The categories are identical — accounts, property, insurance, debts, digital, contacts, documents, wishes. The account names differ (RRSP and TFSA versus 401(k) and IRA), and the estate process differs by province and state, particularly around probate and how jointly held property passes. The organising job is the same everywhere; the legal specifics are worth confirming locally.
Would you rather not start from a blank page?
Everything above is yours to write in a notebook — it costs nothing and it works. If you would rather be walked through it question by question and hand your family a finished document instead of a list, that is what LegacyLetter does: it turns plain answers into a one-page estate map, organised the way an executor reads it.
See how the builder works →$24 · runs in your browser · you can also just look at a finished example first.