Life changes generate paperwork and break assumptions. A new address invalidates records in a dozen systems. A marriage or divorce changes who has access to what. A new job means files that belong to someone else. A death leaves accounts nobody can reach.
The technical work is mostly small. The problem is that it's spread across a lot of places, and the items you forget tend to surface at the worst possible moment — an insurance claim denied because the address was wrong, a locked account because the recovery phone belongs to an ex.
Here's what to handle, organized by situation.
Moving house
The document work
☐ Start a folder for the move itself.
04-PROJECTS/Move 2026/
old-house/
new-house/
moving-company/
utilities/Keep everything here during the process, then distribute it into your permanent structure once you're settled.
☐ Before you leave: photograph everything. The condition of the old place, especially if renting — every room, every existing mark, meter readings on move-out day with the meter and the date visible. Deposit disputes are common and photographs settle them.
☐ Document the new place on arrival. Same photos, same meter readings, same day. Note the condition of anything damaged before you're blamed for it.
☐ Record the practical details immediately, while you can still find them:
Reference/Household/new-house-details
Furnace filter size
Paint colors and brands, by room
Water shutoff location
Breaker panel layout
Septic/well service company
Trash and recycling schedule
Appliance model and serial numbersThis note takes twenty minutes on move-in week and saves hours over the following years. The filter size alone gets looked up repeatedly.
☐ Archive the old house's records — but don't delete them. Improvement records affect capital gains, and disputes can surface years later. Move them to 06-ARCHIVE/Old House - [address]/.
The address change list
This is where things get missed. Work through it systematically:
Government and legal: driver's license, vehicle registration, voter registration, tax authorities, passport (address page if applicable), Social Security or equivalent.
Financial: every bank, credit card, investment account, loan servicer, retirement account, and the credit bureaus.
Insurance: home or renters (this one is urgent — coverage may not apply at an address the insurer doesn't know about), auto (rates are address-based), health, life.
Employment: HR, payroll, benefits.
Medical: every doctor, dentist, specialist, pharmacy, veterinarian.
Services: phone, internet, streaming with billing addresses, subscription boxes, anything shipping physical goods.
Personal: update your emergency contact information, and tell the people who'd need to reach you.
☐ Set up mail forwarding — and treat it as a safety net rather than a solution. Forwarding expires, typically after six to twelve months. Use the forwarded mail as a checklist: anything still arriving at the old address after two months is something you missed.
Marriage or moving in together
☐ Decide what's shared and what isn't. This is a conversation, not a filing decision, and having it explicitly prevents friction later.
A structure that works:
PERSONAL - Laurie/
PERSONAL - Dave/
HOUSEHOLD/
Home and Property/
Insurance/
Bills/
Shared Financial/Individual documents stay individual. Shared obligations go in the household folder, accessible to both.
☐ Both people need access to household records. This is not a formality. If one person handles all the bills and becomes ill, the other needs to be able to step in without reconstructing everything from scratch.
☐ Update beneficiaries. Retirement accounts, life insurance, and payable-on-death designations override your will in most jurisdictions. Marriage does not automatically update them.
☐ Update emergency contacts everywhere — medical, employment, schools.
☐ Name changes, if applicable, follow the same list as an address change, plus your email address and professional accounts.
☐ Set up shared password access for household accounts through a password manager's sharing feature, not by texting passwords back and forth.
Divorce or separation
Handle this deliberately and calmly. The order matters.
☐ Copy your own documents first, before anything else. Everything in your name, everything you'd need, everything from shared storage that's genuinely yours. Do this before access changes.
☐ Separate the accounts. Shared cloud storage, streaming, shopping accounts, phone plans, joint email addresses. Each needs a decision about who keeps it.
☐ Change passwords on everything personal — and check that the recovery email and phone on each account aren't your former partner's. This is the item most commonly missed, and it means someone else can reset your passwords indefinitely.
☐ Check for shared device access. Location sharing, shared Apple or Google family accounts, "find my device," shared photo libraries, family plans on subscription services. These persist quietly.
☐ Update beneficiaries. Divorce does not automatically remove a former spouse as beneficiary in every jurisdiction, and there are many cases of insurance paying out to an ex years later because nobody updated the form.
☐ Update your will, powers of attorney, and healthcare directives.
☐ Don't delete shared photos. Archive them. Family history doesn't stop being family history, especially where children are involved, and this is a decision people regret making in a difficult month.
☐ Update emergency contacts at work, at medical providers, at schools.
New job or leaving one
☐ Before you leave, take what's genuinely yours. Your own work samples, portfolio pieces, contacts you brought with you, personal files stored on a work device.
Be careful here. Company data, client lists, and proprietary material belong to the employer, and taking them can have legal consequences. If in doubt, don't. Ask what's permitted.
☐ Get copies of employment records — offer letter, contracts, performance reviews, benefits summaries, pension and retirement statements, the final pay stub, and any equity documentation.
☐ Handle the retirement account. Leaving it with a former employer is an option, and it becomes easy to lose track of. Note it in your records at minimum.
☐ Remove personal accounts from work devices before returning them. Email, browser profiles, password managers, cloud storage. And remove work accounts from your personal devices.
☐ Update your address and personal email anywhere the old work email was the contact.
☐ Archive the whole job. 06-ARCHIVE/Employment - [company] 2019-2026/. Keep it — employment history matters for pensions, references, and occasionally for legal reasons.
Death in the family
There's a practical version of this that's worth having written down, because it happens during the worst week of someone's life.
☐ Get certified death certificates — more than you think. Ten to fifteen is a common recommendation. Nearly every institution requires an original certified copy, and ordering more later is slow.
☐ Find the will. The original signed copy, not a photocopy — many jurisdictions require the original for probate.
☐ Look for a locator document. If the person kept one, it names the attorney, the accountant, the insurance policies, and where things are.
☐ Secure digital access before anything is closed. Email especially, since it's the recovery path for everything else. If you have legal authority, act on this early — accounts get locked, and recovering a deceased person's account without prior arrangements ranges from difficult to impossible.
☐ Look for these specifically, since they're commonly missed: life insurance policies, pensions from decades-old employers, safe deposit boxes, savings bonds, and any business interests.
☐ Notify, in rough order: Social Security or equivalent, employer or pension provider, banks, insurers, credit bureaus (to prevent identity theft, which is unfortunately common after a death), utilities, and subscription services.
☐ Don't rush to delete anything. Voicemails, photos, messages, social accounts. Save recordings of their voice before carriers delete them — this is a common and permanent regret. Decide about accounts later, when there's time to think.
The general pattern
Every life change involves the same four moves:
- Copy and secure what's yours, before access changes
- Update the address, contact details, and access everywhere they're recorded
- Update beneficiaries, emergency contacts, and legal documents — the ones nobody thinks of
- Archive the old chapter rather than deleting it
The third one causes the most real damage when skipped. Beneficiary designations, recovery phone numbers, and emergency contacts are set once and then invisible for years — until the moment they matter, when they're pointing at a life you no longer have.
Afterward
Once things settle, spend an hour on the full annual review — files, backups, security, subscriptions, accounts. A life change touches more systems than any checklist anticipates, and the review catches what the checklist missed.
Then update your locator document, and tell someone where it is.
Next in this series: How to Build a Legacy Folder Your Family Can Find