If something happened to you tomorrow, could your partner or your family find every account you hold within a day? Not eventually, after weeks of forwarded post and guessing at old email addresses. Within a day.
Most people I ask this can't say yes. It's not because they're disorganised. It's because modern banking doesn't leave a trail the way it used to. A generation ago, most of what mattered arrived as paper: bank statements, insurance certificates, a mortgage document in a drawer somewhere. Someone could go through a filing cabinet and reconstruct a fairly complete picture. Now most of that lives behind a login only one person knows, spread across half a dozen apps that never send anything in the post at all. If you're the only one who knows it exists, it may as well not exist to anyone else.
The goal isn't a spreadsheet with every password in it. It's a list thorough enough that someone else could find everything and know who to contact, without needing your login for a single one of them.
Bank accounts. Every current account, savings account, and joint account, with the provider and roughly what's in each. You don't need account numbers if you'd rather leave those off; the provider name and account type are usually enough to start a claim or transfer process.
Investments. ISAs, general investment accounts, and any shares or funds held outside a pension, along with who they're held with.
Pensions. Every workplace pension from every job you've had, plus any personal pension or SIPP. This is the category people miss most, especially pots from jobs several employers ago that never got mentioned to anyone.
Insurance. Life insurance, income protection, critical illness cover, and home or contents insurance, with the provider and policy type for each. If a policy is written in trust, note who the trustees are.
Property. Any property you own, whether you live in it, rent it out, or hold it jointly, along with roughly what's owed against it.
Loans and other debts. Mortgages, personal loans, and credit cards, so nobody discovers a debt by accident months later.
Digital assets. Domain names, cryptocurrency, and anything else that only exists online and has real value but no physical form.
Key documents and contacts. Where your will and Lasting Power of Attorney are held, and the contact details for your solicitor, financial adviser, or accountant if you have one.
Writing all of this down only helps if it's stored sensibly. A few rules make the difference between a genuinely useful document and a security problem waiting to happen.
Never include passwords or login details. The list should say what exists and where, not how to log in. If someone needs access, that's what probate, power of attorney, or a provider's bereavement process is for.
Skip full account numbers and other sensitive identifiers. Provider and account type are usually enough for someone to know where to start. If you want more precision, keep sensitive numbers in a separate, more secure location, not on the general list.
Use roles instead of names where you can. Writing "spouse" or "eldest child" instead of a specific name means the document doesn't need updating every time a name changes, and it stays useful even if it's read by someone slightly removed from the immediate family.
Think about your digital legacy separately. Decide who should have access to your primary email account if something happens to you, since most password resets for everything else route through it. A surprising number of "lost" accounts are really just lost because nobody could get back into the email address they were registered to.
Don't put an unencrypted copy in general cloud storage. A password-protected document, or a proper password manager with an emergency access feature, is a much safer home for this than a plain file sitting in a shared drive.
Review it once a year. Old accounts get closed, new ones get opened, and a pension from a job you left three years ago is exactly the kind of thing that quietly falls off a list nobody's looked at since it was written.
Copy this into a document and fill in what applies to you. Provider and type is enough for most rows; leave out anything you'd rather keep separate and more secure.
This list only stays useful if it stays current, which is exactly where most people give up on it: a spreadsheet updated once with good intentions and never touched again. Gild keeps the account and pension side of this current automatically, so the manual list you keep for wills, LPAs, and contacts stays short, and the parts that actually change on their own don't depend on you remembering to update them.
Everything in one place: your banks, pensions, investments, and goals.
🔒 Your data, never sold. Always protected.