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 until the day it doesn't.
The problem isn't losing the documents
The problem is that nobody else can find them. A locked filing cabinet and a shared cloud folder fail in opposite ways. The cabinet is secure, but nobody else can use it. The shared folder is easy to use, and anyone who gets into the account can read all of it.
What we think works better
- Everything in one place, sorted by person rather than by folder
- Locked so that the company storing it (us) can't read it
- Shared on purpose, one item at a time, instead of all or nothing
- Easy to download in full, so you can always leave
That's what we built. Everything else is detail.
Try it with your own family
See pricingRelated reading
- End-to-end encryption, explained for familiesWhat end-to-end encryption means, what it protects your family from, and the trade-off for getting back in: no password resets, a paper Recovery Kit instead.
- Could you find it in five minutes?The documents every family should be able to find fast: a checklist by category, how long to keep each one, and a way of organising them that holds up.
- 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.