You already know how to prepare

To veterans, active duty, and military families: this is the same preparedness you were trained in, applied to the part that only lives in your head.

The NextOfKin App

A short checklist of four rows on a pale blue-grey ground: three marked complete with teal check boxes, the fourth left unmarked.

You spent years planning for contingencies. Then you came home, and life got busy, and the one plan nobody hands you is the one about your own logistics.

You are unusually good at this. It’s the same instinct — add what someone would need, before anyone needs it.

What service adds to the list

Alongside the ordinary accounts, there is a layer specific to you, and it is the layer people outside it don’t know to ask about:

Which benefits you’re enrolled in, and the portal each one lives behind
Pension or retirement details, and who administers them
Healthcare coverage, and how it interacts with anything civilian
Your DD-214 and where the physical copy is kept

Nobody can look that up on your behalf. It has to come from you, and it takes an afternoon.

What belongs with an attorney

A will, a power of attorney, a healthcare agent, and — if you have children — guardianship. Those are legal instruments, and they belong in legal documents drawn up by someone qualified. Many installations offer legal assistance at no cost; it is worth asking.

What’s worth adding

Everything else. Where things are, which account does what, who to call. Not the passwords — the map. A good plan is a table of contents, not a vault.

One small thing

Where is your DD-214?

It is the document almost every benefit asks for first, and the one most likely to be in a drawer nobody else has opened.

Knowing which drawer is the whole answer — and it takes a sentence to add.

When you open the app next, we’ll ask one more question. That’s it.

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