The paperwork problem nobody talks about
The Vault For Us team · 7 October 2026 · 4 min read
In most families one person handles the paperwork. They know which drawer the insurance is in, when the passport expires, and which of the four email addresses the bank actually uses.
That works right up until it doesn't.
The failure isn't losing the documents
It's that nobody else can find them. A locked filing cabinet and a shared cloud folder fail in opposite directions: one is secure and unusable by anyone else, the other is usable and readable by whoever gets into the account.
What we think the shape should be
- Everything in one place, organised by person rather than by folder
- Encrypted so that the company hosting it — us — cannot read it
- Shared deliberately, item by item, rather than all-or-nothing
- Exportable, so leaving is always possible
That's the product. The rest is detail.
Try it with your own family
See pricingRelated reading
- End-to-end encryption, explained for familiesWhat end-to-end encryption actually means, what it protects your family from, and the recovery tradeoff — no password resets, a paper Recovery Kit — in plain language.
- Could you find it in five minutes?The documents every family should be able to find fast — a practical checklist by category, how long to keep each, and an organising method that survives real life.
- If something happens to you, who can find anything?Digital legacy for ordinary families: what gets lost when one person holds all the knowledge, who needs access to what, and why a written handbook beats scattered memory.