The phone call nobody plans for.
Somebody in your family gets a phone call. You are in hospital, or overseas, or simply unreachable. In the first forty eight hours the people who love you are not thinking about paperwork. They are thinking about you.
Then the practical questions start arriving, and they arrive quickly.
Which hospital fund are you with? What is the policy number? Does the mortgage have insurance attached to it? Who is your accountant? Is there a power of attorney, and if there is, where is it? Does anyone have the code to your phone?
None of these questions are complicated. Every one of them has an answer. The problem is almost never that the information does not exist. The problem is that it lives in eleven different places, and only one person knows where those places are.
That person is you.
This guide walks through how to fix that, in a way that takes a few hours rather than a year and that leaves your family with answers instead of a hasty search.
Why “we’ll sort it out if it happens” fails.
Most Australian families assume the important things are already handled. The evidence suggests otherwise.
Research released in 2025 found that only 42 per cent of Australians have a current will that reflects their current situation. That leaves the majority of adults without one, or with one so out of date it no longer matches the life they are living.
Advance care planning tells a similar story. A national audit of more than 4,000 older Australians across hospitals, GP clinics and residential aged care found that only 29 per cent had any advance care planning documentation at all, and only 14 per cent had a legally binding advance care directive available at their point of care. So even among people who had thought about it, the document was frequently not where it needed to be at the moment it was needed.
Then there is the money that simply goes unfound. As at 30 June 2025, the Australian Taxation Office reported just over $18.9 billion in lost and unclaimed superannuation sitting across just under 7.3 million accounts. That is not money that vanished. It is money nobody knew to look for.
The pattern in all three of these numbers is the same. The failure is rarely a failure of intention. It is a failure of location. Families are not short on love or willingness. They are short on a starting point.
The five questions your family will need answered
Before you organise a single document, it helps to know what you are actually preparing for. In practice, the people supporting you will need to answer five questions, usually within the first week.
1. What are your medical wishes? If you cannot speak for yourself, someone will be asked to speak for you. An advance care directive, an enduring guardianship, and a clearly nominated decision maker turn an impossible conversation into a straightforward one. Without them, your family is left guessing, and often disagreeing.
2. Who is legally allowed to act for you? An enduring power of attorney covers financial and legal decisions. It only works if it exists, is valid in your state or territory, and can be produced on request. A copy sitting in a solicitor’s filing cabinet that nobody can name is not much use at 9pm on a Sunday.
3. What do you own, and what do you owe? Bank accounts, superannuation, insurance policies, the mortgage, the car loan, the investment property, the shares your father left you in 2009. Your family does not need the balances. They need the list.
4. Who needs to be contacted? Your employer, your accountant, your solicitor, your doctor, your insurance broker, your child’s school. Also the practical ones people forget, like the person who walks the dog and the neighbour who has a spare key.
5. What is running on autopilot? Direct debits, subscriptions, the electricity account in your name, the phone plan, the storage unit. These keep charging whether or not anyone is watching, and they are surprisingly difficult to unwind without account details.
If your family can answer those five questions inside an hour, you are prepared. If they cannot, this is the work.
The alternative plan
You do not need a solicitor to start. You need a list, a phone camera and one secure place to put everything.
Step one: gather the core documents
Start with the ones that cause the most disruption when they are missing.
- Birth certificate, marriage certificate, passport, driver licence
- Will, and the contact details of whoever holds the original
- Enduring power of attorney and enduring guardianship
- Advance care directive
- Medicare card, private health details, My Health Record access
- Home, contents, car, life, income protection and travel insurance policies
- Superannuation statements, including any old funds you have not consolidated
- Mortgage or lease documents, and rates notices
- Recent tax return and your accountant’s details
Step two: write down what only lives in your head
This is the part people skip, and it is the part families miss most.
- Which bank each account sits with, and which one the mortgage is attached to
- Whether your life insurance is inside super or held separately
- Who your accountant, solicitor, financial adviser and insurance broker are
- Where the spare keys are, and who has one
- Which of your subscriptions are annual and roughly when they renew
- Anything you would want handled a particular way, and why
None of this is confidential in the dramatic sense. It is simply undocumented, and undocumented information is invisible the moment you are unavailable.
Step three: sort out digital access properly
Your phone is now the gateway to your banking, your photos, your two factor authentication codes and your email. Without access to it, almost everything else stalls.
Be careful here. Sharing passwords in a text message, a notes app or a spreadsheet on the family computer is genuinely risky, and it is worth doing properly rather than quickly. What you want is a secure vault where access is controlled, deliberate, and only released to the people you have chosen.
Check the beneficiary nominations on your superannuation and life insurance. These sit outside your will, they are frequently years out of date, and they override assumptions.
Step four: tell someone, appoint a Guardian
A perfectly organised set of documents that nobody knows about is the same as no documents at all.
Choose one or two people ask them if you can appoint them as guardians to your Lyff Vault. Then you will have to add them and email them so they can access what you wish to share with them. You can change your Guardians at any time. The conversation takes five minutes and it is the single highest value step in this entire guide.
Step five: put a date in the calendar
Life moves. You change jobs, refinance, switch insurers, have another child, move house. Once a year, open the vault and check it still describes your actual life. It requires regular updating and management.
Making it easier to keep, not just easier to start
Most people can do the gathering. Where it falls apart is the keep these items securely. The folder in the study drawer goes out of date. The spreadsheet lives on one laptop. The person who knows where everything is moves interstate.
This is the problem Lyff was built to solve.
My Vault gives you one encrypted place for the documents and details that matter, organised across ten categories so you are not staring at an empty folder wondering where to begin. Your vault contents are encrypted using AES-256 and hosted in Australia.
Lyff Guardians are the trusted people in your life. You choose them, and you choose exactly which folders they can reach. Not your whole vault. Only what you have decided they should have.
Lyff Custodians are your professional advisers, your solicitor, accountant, financial planner or broker, with access scoped to the specific documents relevant to their role.
Future Messages lets you write or record something now to be delivered later, on a trigger you set.
The Inactivity Safeguard is the part that matters most for the scenario in this article. If you become uncontactable, Lyff runs a welfare check before anything is released. You decide, item by item, what a Lyff Guardian can see immediately and what requires a formal process first. Delayed items are only released after supporting documentation is provided, including photo identification and a statutory declaration witnessed by a Justice of the Peace. There is never a full vault unlock, and access is never automatic.
You can start with a free Lyff vault and store your first five documents across all ten categories. The Complete plan adds unlimited documents, a Lyff Guardian, two Lyff Custodians, Future Messages and the Inactivity Safeguard from $8.99 a month. The Family plan covers up to four members, each with their own vault.
Start today, don’t put this off
Preparing your family is not a single dramatic act of organisation. It is a series of small, ordinary decisions that add up to something quite significant: the people you love will never have to guess.
Suggested outbound links (authority signals)
| Anchor | URL |
|---|---|
| ATO lost and unclaimed superannuation data | https://www.ato.gov.au/about-ato/research-and-statistics/in-detail/super-statistics/super-accounts-data/super-data-lost-unclaimed-multiple-accounts-and-consolidations/total-lost-fund-held-and-ato-held-super |
| Advance Care Planning Australia | https://www.advancecareplanning.org.au |
| ASIC MoneySmart | https://moneysmart.gov.au |
Sources used for statistics in this article
- Lost and unclaimed superannuation, $18.9 billion across just under 7.3 million accounts as at 30 June 2025. Australian Taxation Office.
- Only 42 per cent of Australians have a current will. Safewill survey of 1,019 people, reported 2025.
- Advance care planning prevalence, 29 per cent with any documentation and 14 per cent with a legally binding advance care directive available at point of care. National multicentre audit of 4,187 Australians aged 65 and over, published in Health Expectations.