In our family interviews this year, one phrase keeps coming back — in some form, in almost every conversation:
"When my father passed, we couldn't find half his finances."
Sometimes it's a son saying it. Sometimes a daughter. Sometimes a surviving spouse. The accounts are different. The institutions are different. The context is different.
What's the same is the moment — usually around the kitchen table the week after the funeral, when a family realizes how much of a person`s financial life lived only in their head.
And the slow, quiet recognition of what comes next.
This is the wake-up call. It's the part nobody warns you about.
The Problem
Most of an organized person's financial life lives in their head.
The chequing account where the pension lands. The workplace pension from a job two careers ago. An insurance policy a parent took out decades ago. The safety-deposit box at a bank they had stopped using. The advisor's number in a phone the family can't unlock. The auto-renewing subscriptions tied to cards no one is watching.
When that head goes quiet, the family is left with a pile of mail and questions with no edges: what else is there?
Why this keeps happening
There are a few reasons families end up here, and none of them are personal failings.
We were never taught how. No one sits us down and says, here is how to map your financial life so the people you love can find it. Schools don't teach it. Banks don't teach it. Most financial advisors focus on growing assets — not documenting where they are.
Talking about it feels like inviting it. Many families carry an unspoken belief that planning for loss somehow brings it closer. So the conversations get postponed. Then postponed again. Decades pass.
The tools we have aren't built for this. Wills get written and locked away. Spreadsheets get started and abandoned. Sticky notes accumulate in a drawer. None of it is something a grieving family can actually use on a Tuesday morning when the mortgage is due.
The information is everywhere. It's in the inbox, on a phone, in a filing cabinet, with the accountant — behind logins only one person ever knew.
The Impact
The cost shows up in two faces.
The money side is easier to see. Pension payments that stop coming. Insurance payouts that sit unclaimed for years because nobody knew to ask. Subscriptions that quietly drain accounts no one is checking.
It adds up. The Bank of Canada alone is holding $1.44B in unclaimed money across 3.4M accounts (Bank of Canada unclaimed balances) — and that's just the chequing and savings dollars at the major Canadian banks. It doesn't include forgotten workplace pensions, expired insurance policies, or money sitting in provincial systems.
The harder cost is on the family. Months of conversations at the kitchen table that nobody wanted to have. Comparing what each person remembers. Wondering whether you've already checked that bank, that drawer, that policy. By the third month, nobody is sure anymore what's been searched and what hasn't.
What we wish more families knew
None of this had to be a search. The information existed before the wake-up call ever came. It just lived in only one person's head.
A single shared record changes the arithmetic. Not a vault. Not a safe.
A record.
A document, kept current, that names what exists and where it exists — accounts, insurance, pensions, property, the advisor, the lawyer, the trusted contact. And the small things, too: the cottage's tax notice, the safety-deposit box and where the key is kept.
A trusted contact, designated and informed, is the second piece. Not the executor — the executor steps in afterward. The trusted contact is the person who knows the record exists, where to find it, and who to call first.
This is the quiet, practical work clarife is being built around — for Canadian families, before the wake-up call ever comes.
If this resonated
You don't have to do this all at once. You don't have to do it perfectly.
You just have to start.
Curious where your family stands today?
Check your readiness → https://clarife.com
This is general information, not tax advice. Consult a qualified professional.
