Essentials Vault

The Essentials Vault is your household's shared life file: insurance, wills, RAs and IDs — one honest picture of your safety net. It exists so that the things that matter most never live only in one person's head, and so that if life throws a curveball, the other person is not left searching.

What goes in

The vault covers ten areas of your life, from Identity and Legal documents through Estate, Insurance, Retirement and Investments, Banking and Debt, Property, Tax, Professionals, Digital access and Household. You start from a Gathering checklist — pick an area and add what you have, one item at a time. You do not need to upload a file to get value: an item is useful the moment you capture its details (provider, policy number, cover amount, renewal date, beneficiaries), and you can attach the document later.

Reviews and reminders

The vault does not just store things — it keeps them fresh. The Due tab surfaces anything that needs a look:

• Reviews due — items that have passed their review date.
• Renewals and expiries soon — anything renewing or expiring within 60 days.
• Beneficiaries to confirm — nominations you have not confirmed in over a year (stale beneficiaries are one of the most common and costly gaps).

These same reminders appear inside the Money Date run, so you review the important stuff while you are both already sitting down together.

Get to know us (the fact-find)

Get to know us is a short, resumable interview — a bit like a good adviser's first meeting. Your answers help build a shared picture of your household and teach the AI Coach about your situation, while also prompting you to add the right things to the vault. You can do it in short sittings and pick up where you left off.

Private items

Couple Capital is honesty-first and shared by default — but some things are genuinely personal, like a surprise gift fund. You can mark an item as private. When you do, only you can see it. Your partner sees a count of how many private items exist, but never their contents. It is transparency and personal space at the same time.

Trusted people and emergency access

This is the part that matters most when it matters most. Under Trusted people you can give a family member or an executor scoped, read-only access to parts of your vault — so the right people can find the right documents when they need to.

How it works, and the safeguards built in:

• Read-only, always. Everything you share is read-only. Trusted people can view what you grant, never change it.
• You choose the scope. Grant access to specific areas of the vault, not the whole thing.
• Up to five trusted people. Invite a parent, sibling or executor by email; they sign up with that email, and then you activate their access.
• Two modes. Immediate access starts as soon as you activate it. Emergency (timed release) means the person has to request access, and it only unlocks after a delay you set — anywhere from 1 to 90 days (7 by default) — during which you can still deny the request if it was not expected.
• You stay in control. You can revoke any access at any time.
• Nothing happens in the dark. An Access log records every invite, activation, request and revocation, and it is visible to both you and your partner.

The Shared with me page is the other side of this: if someone has given you access to their vault, that is where you will find it.

Your documents and AI

Couple Capital can read an uploaded policy or document to pull out the key details for you (provider, cover, renewal date, beneficiaries) so you do not have to type them in. Because vault documents are sensitive, the app tells you exactly where the information goes before it sends anything for analysis. You are always in control of what you upload and what gets analysed. You can also download a full copy of your data at any time — see the FAQ.

Next: set up the kids with Family.