Digital legacy planning in India: a practical starting checklist

"Digital legacy planning" sounds like something that needs a lawyer and a free afternoon you don't have. In practice it's closer to five concrete steps — most of which take minutes each, not hours. Here's the actual checklist, not just the argument for why it matters.

1. Write down what actually exists

Not passwords yet — just an inventory. Bank accounts, demat/investment accounts, insurance policies, property documents, loans (owed and owing), EPF accounts from every employer you've had, and any digital-only assets. Most people are surprised how long this list gets once they actually sit down and make it — a demat account opened once and forgotten, a policy bought years ago as a favor to an agent. This step alone is where most families' gaps come from, not carelessness.

2. Add nominees everywhere the option exists

SEBI made nomination mandatory on every demat account and mutual fund folio starting 1 September 2026 — for good reason. Without a nominee on file, a family needs additional legal documentation just to receive money that is already, legally, theirs. Check every bank account, insurance policy, and investment account you listed in step 1 and confirm a nominee is actually on file, not just assumed.

3. Put the list somewhere findable — and encrypted

A spreadsheet on your desktop or a note in your phone works until the device is lost, breaks, or is itself locked. The list needs to survive independently of any one device, and it needs to be encrypted, because it's effectively a map to your entire financial life. This is the specific gap a structured vault closes — Vaultherit's Investments, Property, and Family & Household record types exist so this list has an actual, permanent home instead of living in a note app.

4. Decide who gets access, and how

Not "tell your spouse the password" — a real mechanism. A splittable emergency access key means no single person holds full access alone. A dead-man's-switch check-in quietly notices if the vault goes unopened past a threshold you set, and only then notifies your nominee. This matters because the alternative — a password written on paper, or told to one person verbally — has a single point of failure: that the paper doesn't survive, or that person doesn't either.

5. Check your Legacy Readiness Score — and close the actual gaps

It's easy to feel done after step 1 and still have real gaps: a policy with no nominee, an EPF account nobody's touched in years, a property document that only exists as a photo on a phone you'll upgrade eventually. Vaultherit's Legacy Readiness Score tracks exactly what's still missing against your own actual records — a checklist tied to what you actually hold, not a generic estate-planning article.

See all twelve sourced scenarios behind why this matters — including the one-hour cashless hospital-claim approval window — on Life Guard, or the parent-specific version of this checklist on Setting this up for your parents.