The minimum both must know
All accounts and where they're held, recurring payments and how they're paid, insurance policies and where documents live, pension fund and 3a locations, and access arrangements (not shared passwords – proper authorisations).
From knowledge to shared practice
A monthly 15-minute money review together beats any document: both see the same numbers, decisions are joint, and the 'knowledge monopoly' dissolves naturally.
Shared visibility, built in
A shared budget hub gives both partners the same live picture – the protocol becomes a habit instead of a binder.
Track these costs in your own budget: create your free Swiss budget in BudgetHub – in English, with Swiss categories built in.
Why one page beats a filing cabinet
The purpose is not completeness but findability: if one partner is suddenly unavailable, the other needs to act within days, not reconstruct a financial life over months. A single sheet listing where things are beats a perfect archive nobody can navigate.
Content: all accounts with institutions, pension fund and 3a providers, insurance policies with their beneficiaries, ongoing obligations, the tax office reference, and where access credentials are stored – not the credentials themselves on the sheet.
Add any vested benefits accounts from previous employers. These are the single most commonly forgotten asset in Switzerland, and reconstructing them years later is genuinely difficult.
The legal documents that make it work
An advance care directive (Vorsorgeauftrag) determines who acts for you if you cannot – without it, adult protection authorities decide, and a spouse's authority is more limited than most people assume.
A patient decree (Patientenverfügung) covers medical decisions. A will matters most for cohabiting couples, who have no automatic inheritance rights, and for anyone wanting to deviate from the statutory division.
Beneficiary clauses on pension and insurance products operate outside the will and pay as written. Reviewing them after marriage, birth, separation or a move is the single highest-value fifteen minutes in this whole exercise.
Making it a habit rather than a project
Once a year, same month, thirty minutes: update the sheet, check beneficiaries, confirm both partners know where it is. Attaching it to an existing annual routine – the tax return, the insurance review – is what makes it survive.
Store one copy digitally in a location both can reach and one on paper somewhere known. Digital-only fails precisely in the scenarios it was written for.
Tell one trusted person outside the household that the document exists and roughly where. Not the contents – just that it exists.