Guide
The first 72 hours
In most families one person holds the operating knowledge: which accounts, which advisers, which keys, and why the structure is the way it is. This guide describes what tends to happen in the first hours and days when that person is suddenly unavailable, and what changes if a few things were written down in advance.
Scope. This guide is about information and access, described as at 30 August 2026. It is not legal advice. Wills, probate, powers of attorney and the question of who is authorised to act belong with your solicitors, and nothing here changes that.
The first hours
The practical decisions arrive before grief has anywhere to go. Someone has to decide who is told, and in what order. Immediate family first, then a small circle: the solicitor, the accountant, a named contact at the bank, a co-director or the person who runs the business day to day. Beyond that circle, nothing needs to be announced yet, and there is a reason to be slow about it. Deaths and serious illnesses are visible events, and people who commit payment fraud read the same notices everyone else does. A family in the first week is unusually easy to approach with a plausible instruction.
Meanwhile a good deal continues on its own. Standing orders, direct debits, card subscriptions, payroll, supplier payments, insurance premiums, school and care fees: none of these stop because a person has. For a few weeks that is a mercy rather than a problem, because it means nothing collapses while the family works out what exists. It becomes a problem later, when a payment fails and nobody knows what it was for.
What locks is narrower and sharper. A phone that cannot be unlocked takes a surprising amount with it. The passcode is not written anywhere, the biometric no longer works, and the handset is now the place where the one time codes for the bank, the email account and the password manager arrive. The mobile number is often the recovery route for everything else, which is why cancelling the contract or losing the SIM in the first week can quietly remove the only path back into an account. In the first hours the useful instruction is a short one: keep the phone charged, keep the number live, and change nothing yet.
The first days
By the second or third day the shape of the difficulty becomes clear. Every adviser holds a piece and none of them holds the picture. The solicitor has the will and possibly the deeds. The accountant knows the companies and the filing history. The bank knows about the accounts it holds and nothing about the ones it does not. There may be an investment manager, an insurance broker, a mortgage adviser, a trustee in another jurisdiction. Each of them answers accurately the question they are asked, and not one of them can tell the family what it has not thought to ask.
Institutions move at the speed of documentation. Banks and registrars respond, reasonably quickly, to the right documents presented by the right named person: a death certificate, and in due course a grant of probate. To anyone else they respond politely and slowly, and that refusal is correct, because the same controls that frustrate a grieving family are the ones that stop a stranger emptying an account. The government's guidance on what to do after a death, including the Tell Us Once service, sets out the official steps and is worth reading before the calls start.
The difference between two families at this point is not money and it is not sophistication. It is whether somebody can say, in one sitting, which adviser holds what. A family that knows spends the first days making calls. A family that does not spends them reading through an email account, if it can get into it, looking for the names of the people it needs to call. That second version takes weeks rather than days, and every decision waits behind it.
The unglamorous blockers
The things that actually hold families up are dull, and that is precisely why nobody addresses them in advance.
- The phone and its number. Second factor for the bank, the email account and most of the rest. No passcode means no codes, and cancelling the number removes the recovery route as well as the handset.
- The email recovery chain. Password resets for everything land in one inbox. Getting into that inbox usually needs the phone, and getting into the phone account usually needs the inbox. The circle is small and it closes.
- The password manager nobody else can open. Often the most complete record of the family's affairs in existence, and designed so that only one person can read it. Most products offer an emergency access or recovery nomination, and it has to be set up beforehand. It cannot be arranged afterwards, which is the entire point of it.
- The safe with one keyholder. A safe, a deposit box or a fireproof document box held in a single name, with no second keyholder and no record of what is inside it.
- The obligation nobody else knew about. A personal guarantee behind a company facility, a lease guaranteed personally, a loan into a business, a director's loan account. These surface when the counterparty writes, which is rarely early and never convenient.
What to write down this week
None of the following needs a consultant, a system or a budget. It can be done in an evening by anyone, and it removes most of the delay described above.
- Who to call, in order, in the first day. Names and numbers, not job titles.
- Which adviser holds what. One line each: solicitor, accountant, bank contact, investment manager, insurance broker, any trustee.
- Where the originals are. The will, deeds, share certificates, policies, and the safe or box they sit in, with a note of who else holds a key.
- How the family would open the phone, the email account and the password manager, lawfully and in a way agreed in advance. That usually means naming an emergency contact inside the password manager and a legacy contact on the phone and email accounts, and agreeing where the phone passcode is held.
- Recurring commitments someone else should know about: payroll, school and care fees, insurance renewals, and any guarantee given personally.
One page, held by two people, one of whom does not live in the same house. Because it describes access as well as assets, it should be treated as sensitive: keep it where a burglar or an intruder in an email account cannot reach it, and record where things are and who holds them rather than copying secrets around unnecessarily.
Two caveats. This list is the minimum, not a plan, and it will not answer every question the family faces. And it decays: advisers retire, banks change, accounts open and close, and a page written this week is materially wrong within a year or two. Keeping it current is the real work, and it is the part that usually does not happen.
For whoever takes it on afterwards, whether that is wealth inherited or the control of someone else's affairs, coming into wealth, or control of it covers the security and information side of the months that follow.
When it should be done properly
Where the structure is larger than one page can hold, or where the page keeps going out of date, the maintained version of this is continuity mapping: people, entities, assets, liabilities, advisers, documents and access recorded properly, reviewed as things change, and accompanied by a written first 72 hours procedure meant to be followed by someone who is not technical and not at their best. If you would rather start by seeing where the gaps are, the family security index covers succession and access alongside the rest, and runs entirely in your own browser.