Emergency / Household Info Binder

The place someone else looks when you are not there

A partner. A grown-up child, a carer, a house-sitter. At some point one of them is going to need to know which surgery to phone, or where the stop-cock is, or where on earth the will is kept, and they are going to need to know it in a hurry.

Choose the sheets you want. Each prints on its own labelled page, ready to slot behind a divider tab, and five of the six start out selected. Pet Care is off unless you switch it on.

Print it, fill it in with a pen, put it somewhere the whole household knows about. A kitchen drawer. A fireproof box. A binder by the front door.

What each sheet asks for

Emergency Contacts

The number to call first, a primary and a secondary contact with their relationship, an out-of-town contact, and a table for the rest. This one goes at the very front, because it is the sheet somebody reaches for while still holding a phone.

Medical Information

Name, date of birth, blood type, allergies, conditions, GP, pharmacy, policy number, and a medication table with dose, times per day and what each one is for. That last column is the one people leave blank and the one a relief carer needs most.

Household and Utilities

Where the shut-offs are for water, for gas, for the electrics. Then the Wi-Fi name and password, the alarm code, the key-holder, and a table of providers with their account numbers and phone lines on it.

Insurance and Finance

Bank, adviser, solicitor, where the will and the power of attorney live, and a policy table covering the type, the provider, the number, the renewal date.

Important Documents

Where the safe is and who holds the code, any safety-deposit box, and a long table logging each document, where it is, and whether a copy exists.

Pet Care

Vet and emergency vet, microchip number, feeding routine, medication, and a table of the animals themselves, so a neighbour can step in without making a single phone call.

Why paper, specifically

• It works when a phone is dead, locked, or has no signal. Paper needs no password and no battery.
• Anyone in the house can find it, not only the person whose phone holds the apps and the logins.
• A paramedic can read a medication table in seconds. They cannot read your notes app.
• It gathers into one place details that currently live scattered across emails and drawers and memory, and memory is the one that fails first under stress.
• Refilling it once a year is a natural prompt to check whether the policies and the contacts are still current, which is a job nobody otherwise schedules.

Nothing you write goes anywhere

This is a printable worksheet rather than a fillable form, and the PDF is built in your browser. The sensitive parts, the conditions and the account numbers and the passwords and the location of the will, are written by hand onto paper afterwards.

Which means none of it is typed into anything, sent anywhere, or stored on any server, including ours. The only inputs the tool ever sees are your household name and which sheets you ticked.

The trade is that the finished binder is a physical document containing everything about your household in one place. Treat it accordingly: somewhere secure, and shred the old version rather than binning it when you update.

Filling it in

1. Type a household name, or leave it blank. It prints in the header of every sheet.
2. Tick the sections you want.
3. Decide whether to print the store-securely note at the foot of each page.
4. Print at full scale, fill it in by hand, and tell somebody else where it is.

That last step is the one people skip, and a binder nobody knows about is a binder that does not exist.