The folder only you understand

Early in Goethe’s Faust, a young student arrives hoping to learn how to study and is received by Mephistopheles, who has put on Faust’s academic gown and is enjoying the role of professor. Told to take careful notes, the student is delighted: “Denn, was man schwarz auf weiß besitzt, / Kann man getrost nach Hause tragen.” Roughly: whatever you have in black and white, you can carry home with confidence. Goethe is teasing him: the young man seems keener on owning notes than on understanding them. Applied to insurance policies, bank details and powers of attorney, though, the line holds up surprisingly well, provided someone other than you knows where the paper is.

Plenty of households keep their paperwork in good order, and exactly one person understands how it works. If that person is suddenly out of action, everyone else goes hunting. Many couples also assume that being married means they can act for each other anyway. Since 1 January 2023, German law does give spouses an emergency right of representation, but according to the Federal Ministry of Justice it covers acute medical decisions only, applies only to couples who are not living apart, and lasts six months at most. Money matters are excluded, which is why the ministry still recommends a Vorsorgevollmacht, the German lasting power of attorney. Where there isn’t one, the federal health portal explains, a court appoints someone as legal representative (rechtliche Betreuung).

In the CapitalPath approach this is part of Protect. Cover that nobody can find in an emergency is cover nobody can claim on. A single page listing each insurer, policy number and storage place takes an afternoon at most. Deciding who should hold a power of attorney deserves a separate, unhurried conversation.

Sabine is 49 and works as a physiotherapist. Her husband Jörg is a land surveyor and, for twenty years, the keeper of the household paperwork: two lever-arch files in the study, labelled in his small, sloping hand. In March he slips on the wet cellar stairs and spends a week in hospital with a bad fracture. On his second day the ward asks about his supplementary cover for a two-bed room. Sabine knows he has a policy but not which company it is with, and it takes her an hour at his desk to find it among old car insurance letters. Later that day she phones the bank because a transfer is due from Jörg’s account, and is told, kindly but firmly, that she would need a power of attorney.

Once Jörg is home with orders to keep his leg up, they spend a Sunday afternoon at the dining table. He talks her through the files while she writes it all down: each policy with the insurer, the number and the file it sits in, then the bank, their two pension insurance numbers and the GP’s phone number. A little over an hour later everything fits on one sheet of paper. “I always thought those files were self-explanatory,” Jörg says. “They didn’t explain much to me that morning,” Sabine replies.

The powers of attorney are a different matter, and neither of them wants to rush them. Jörg would like to ask his sister Kerstin first whether she would be willing to step in as a second person they trust, and Sabine wants time to read up. So the overview goes inside the front cover of the first file, and the rest is put aside, deliberately, for a week. “Same time next Sunday,” Jörg says. “I’ll have talked to Kerstin by then.”