Family Continuity
Family Continuity makes sure trusted people can find what matters if you cannot guide them: contacts, check-in rules, and carefully scoped access packages. It is not estate planning.
Key takeaways
- Family Continuity answers four questions for a trusted person: what exists, where it is, who to contact, and what can be shared.
- Access packages are scoped per contact and per ledger, and default to a masked inventory rather than balances and documents.
- It complements, and never replaces, wills, powers of attorney, and other legal arrangements.
Most financial records assume their owner is available to explain them. Family Continuity is Owniko's answer to the day that assumption fails: a hospitalization, an accident, a death, or simply being unreachable when something urgent needs paying.
The three pieces
- Trusted contacts. The specific people who should be able to find things: a spouse, an adult child, an accountant, an attorney.
- Check-in rules. Owner-controlled conditions under which access is released. Until your rules trigger, nothing is shared; you remain in control the entire time.
- Access packages. Per contact and per ledger, exactly what that person would receive, from a contact map only, to a masked inventory of what exists and who to call, up to selected documents or a fuller ledger view. Defaults are deliberately conservative: masked inventory, no balances, no transaction detail.
An example
A spouse might receive the masked inventory and selected documents for the household ledger; an adult child, only the contact map; the accountant, the document locator and account list for the business ledger. Each person gets what their role needs and nothing else.
The boundary that matters
Family Continuity organizes findability. It does not create wills, trusts, powers of attorney, or beneficiary designations, and it grants no legal authority over your finances. Those come from legal arrangements made with a qualified professional; the CFPB's Managing Someone Else's Money guides are a good plain-language introduction to the roles involved. The two layers work best together: legal authority to act, and an organized map of what to act on.
Where you’ll see it
Family Continuity has its own area under Analyze in the navigation. The setup order that works: add trusted contacts, set check-in rules, then shape each access package, starting from the defaults and loosening only where a role truly needs more.