How to find someone's bank accounts, pensions and policies after they die

There is no single register you can search to find everything somebody owned. That is the honest answer, and it is why this task takes most families months rather than an afternoon.

What works instead is a systematic sweep of four sources: their post, their bank statements, their email, and the official tracing services that exist for pensions and unclaimed assets. Between them you will usually find the great majority of it.

Start with twelve months of bank statements

This is the highest-yield hour you will spend, because almost everything leaves a trace here.

4 things to do

Regular outgoings reveal insurance policies, subscriptions, service contracts and standing orders.
Regular incomings reveal pensions, annuities, benefits and rental income.
Annual payments are easy to miss, so look across a full twelve months rather than three.
Small recurring amounts are often the ones nobody knows about, and they keep taking money long after a death if nobody stops them.

Ticks are for this visit only. Nothing here is saved anywhere.

Keep the post for at least a year

Annual statements are the single best source for accounts nobody knew about. A pension the person had from a job in the 1980s will usually announce itself once a year and never otherwise.

This is why redirecting post matters so much, and why clearing a house too quickly causes problems. If post stops arriving and nobody kept the last year of it, the trail goes cold.

Where else to look

6 things to do

Their email, searched for words like statement, policy, renewal, premium and pension.
Their phone, for banking and authenticator apps that name institutions.
The pension tracing service most countries run, which finds schemes from former employers.
Unclaimed asset registers, which hold dormant accounts and lost policies.
Their accountant, attorney or solicitor, who often knows more than the family does.
The loft, the filing box, and the drawer nobody has opened, which sound like jokes and are where a great deal of this is actually found.

Ticks are for this visit only. Nothing here is saved anywhere.

What you will need before anybody talks to you

Almost every institution will want a certified copy of the death certificate, proof of your own identity, and evidence of your authority to act, which usually means the will naming you as executor plus the court document appointing you, called letters testamentary in most of the United States and a grant of probate in the United Kingdom.

It is worth assembling that set once and keeping it together, because you will be asked for exactly the same three things perhaps twenty times.

Accept that you will not find everything

Billions sit in dormant accounts and untraced pensions, mostly because the only person who knew about them died. A thorough search finds most of it and almost never all of it, and at some point continuing to look costs more than it recovers.

That is not a failure on your part. It is the predictable result of a system where the information lived in one person's head.