Executor File

How to find every account someone owned: a working checklist

By Jamie Watters ·

If someone has died and left no list, you are about to do detective work. This page is the working checklist for that job: every category where accounts hide, in the order that protects the estate best. It is written for the executor or family member doing the finding, not for lawyers.

Two principles before the list.

Preserve before dispose. Early on, your job is to find things and stop losses, not to close things. Keep the main email inbox alive; almost every other account resets through it. Keep the internet and phone contracts running at first; devices and two-factor codes depend on them.

Statements are the honest discovery method. A year of bank and card statements shows nearly everything that charges money: subscriptions, insurance, utilities, storage units. Ask the bank for them early; banks have bereavement teams for exactly this.

Money

  • Current and checking accounts, at every bank, in every currency.
  • Savings accounts, including fixed-term deposits and the account opened for one good rate years ago.
  • Pensions, including every previous employer’s workplace pension. Old workplace pensions are among the most commonly lost assets.
  • Workplace benefits: death-in-service life cover, share schemes, health plans. These often pay out only if claimed.
  • Investments: brokerages, index funds, robo-advisers, employee share accounts.
  • Insurance: life, income protection, critical illness, then home, contents and vehicle. Paid-up value and refunds matter too.
  • Mortgages and loans, including private lending between family members, in both directions.
  • Credit cards, including the retail card used twice a year.
  • Tax accounts and the accountant’s details.
  • Physical cash, safes and safe deposit boxes, and where the keys live.

Recurring charges

  • Utilities: power, water, broadband, phone contracts.
  • Subscriptions: streaming, news, apps, cloud storage, gyms, clubs, charities with recurring gifts.
  • App-store subscriptions, which hide inside the Apple or Google account rather than on obvious statements.

Digital infrastructure

  • Email accounts, every one. The main inbox usually deserves preserving until the estate is settled.
  • The password manager: which one, and what emergency access it offers.
  • Domains, at every registrar. Domains lapse and get bought by strangers.
  • Hosting, servers and cloud accounts, which bill monthly and break things when they lapse.
  • Cloud storage: what is in there that exists nowhere else?
  • Payment processors such as PayPal, Stripe and Wise, which often hold real balances.

Businesses, crypto and the rest

  • Online businesses: what each one is, what it runs on, and what dies if hosting lapses.
  • Company shareholdings and partnerships, and any shareholder agreement with death provisions.
  • Royalties: books, music, stock photos, app-store income.
  • Crypto: hardware wallets, seed backups and exchange accounts. A missed wallet is unrecoverable, not merely delayed, so treat these as urgent.
  • Storage units, items lent to others, airline miles and hotel points, and the photo libraries that exist nowhere else.

Per-country notes

  • UK: the government’s Tell Us Once service notifies most departments in one go. Unclaimed pensions can be traced through the Pension Tracing Service. “Sorting out someone’s affairs” starts with the grant of probate, or letters of administration if there is no will.
  • US: each agency is notified separately. Check state unclaimed-property databases; forgotten accounts often end up there. Retirement accounts and transfer-on-death designations pass outside the will.
  • Canada: notify Service Canada; check the Bank of Canada’s unclaimed balances register for dormant accounts.
  • Australia: the Australian Death Notification Service covers many institutions at once. Superannuation sits outside the will and follows the binding nomination, so contact each fund directly.
  • New Zealand: small estates can sometimes bypass letters of administration for KiwiSaver balances; ask the provider.

The version you fill in before it is needed

This checklist exists because most people leave nothing better. The kinder version is to answer these questions once, while you can, and leave the answers where your executor will find them. That is exactly what Executor File is: this checklist as a fill-in register, sealed in an encrypted file your family keeps, with one printed page that says how to open it. It is free and open source, and it takes about an hour.