Household Basics: The Small Things That Bring Everything Else to a Halt

The everyday things nobody thinks to write down: where the spare car key is, the garage door code, the alarm system code and which company monitors it, and — separately — a home safe combination or a safe deposit box location. Each one is trivial to share in advance and genuinely disruptive to reconstruct after the fact.

Lawn care, house cleaning, security monitoring, pool service, HVAC maintenance — these keep running, and in some cases keep charging a card, whether or not anyone's paying attention. A simple list helps more than people expect: who the vendor is, how they're paid, and how to pause or cancel the service if needed.

Worth its own callout, since it's easy to set up and then forget to mention. Note which bank, the box number, and who — if anyone — has a key or signature authority on it already. A safe deposit box nobody knows about, or that nobody can open, defeats the entire purpose of using one.

Under Household, log access points (car keys, garage and alarm codes), safe deposit box and home safe details, and your list of recurring vendors and how they're paid.

No — none of them need any access at all. Under People, you can add each one as a contact — the lawn care company, the alarm monitoring service, the cleaning service, the HVAC contractor — with just a name and phone number. The point isn't giving these people access to anything. It's making sure whoever's handling things for you can actually call the right number instead of digging through old mail or guessing at a company name from a bank statement.