What your spouse needs to know about your insurance

In most households, one person handles insurance. They pay the premiums, take the agent's calls, and file the statements. The arrangement works fine right up until that person is the one who is gone — at which point their spouse is left reconstructing a system they never saw.

The eight things your spouse should know

1. How many life insurance policies exist, and roughly what each one pays.
2. Which carriers issued them, and the claims phone number for each.
3. Whether there is coverage through an employer, and who to call in HR.
4. Who is named as primary and contingent beneficiary on each policy.
5. How premiums are paid — which account, on what schedule, and what happens if a payment is missed.
6. The name and number of the agent or advisor, if there is one.
7. Where the documents live, physically and digitally.
8. How to get into the vault, safe, or account that holds them.

How to have the conversation

Keep it to thirty minutes and make it concrete. Sit down together, pull up every policy, and walk through the list above out loud. The goal is not for your spouse to become an insurance expert. The goal is for them to be able to answer the first three questions a claims representative will ask.

Do it in both directions. Coverage through the other spouse's employer, an old policy from a previous job, or a small whole life policy a parent bought decades ago are exactly the kinds of things that get forgotten by the person who did not buy them.

Then check the beneficiary designations together

This is the natural moment to catch a stale designation — an ex-spouse, a deceased parent, a missing contingent, a child who is now an adult. Reviewing them side by side takes minutes and prevents the most expensive paperwork mistake in personal finance.

Write it down before you forget it

A conversation fades. Capture the answers in one place both of you can reach: every policy, every carrier, every claims number, every beneficiary. Then extend that access to one more trusted person outside the household — an adult child, a sibling, an executor — in case something happens to both of you at once.

EverKeep is built for exactly this: a shared vault where the person who handles the insurance can hand the whole picture to the person who does not, before it becomes urgent.