Your first 15 minutes.

Step 1: Finish the onboarding quiz.

When you finished signing up, IvorySafe started walking you through a quiz that asks about your life. This isn't busywork. It's how the platform figures out what's relevant to you so it doesn't drown you in fields you don't need. A renter doesn't get asked about a mortgage. Someone without kids doesn't get asked about pediatricians. You only see what fits your actual situation.

The quiz takes about five to ten minutes. Some of the questions might feel personal, things like family relationships, finances, and end-of-life preferences. That's intentional. The whole reason IvorySafe exists is because those are exactly the things families scramble for in a crisis. Answer as much as you can in this first pass. Anything you skip will still be available to fill in later.

By the end of the quiz, parts of your vault will already be populated based on your answers, and the rest will be organized around what's relevant to you. That gives you a much better starting point than an empty dashboard.

Step 2: Add your own basic info.

Open the Family tab and make sure your own profile is complete. Things like your full legal name, date of birth, phone number, and email. If you have a partner or kids, add them too.

This sounds almost too obvious to mention. But this is the bedrock that every other section assumes is there. The professional in the Professional Services tab is "your dentist." The policy in the Insurance tab is "your life insurance." Without you defined first, none of that hangs together.

It's also the easiest tab to fill in, because you already know all the answers. A quick win.

Step 3: Designate at least one emergency contact.

This is the single most important thing you'll do in your first session. If something happened to you tomorrow and you'd added nothing else to your vault but one emergency contact, your family would still know where to start. Without an emergency contact, none of the rest of the vault is reachable in a crisis.

Open the Emergency Contacts section and add someone you trust deeply. Most people start with a spouse, an adult sibling, or a close family member. You'll be asked for their name, phone number, email, and a waiting period.

The waiting period is how long IvorySafe will try to reach you before transferring access to your emergency contact. Here's how it works: if your emergency contact reports that something has happened to you, IvorySafe doesn't immediately hand them the keys to your vault. We first try to contact you, and we keep trying for the length of the waiting period you've set. If you don't respond in that window, access transfers to your contact.

The default is one week, which is a good balance for most people. A shorter window (as short as 6 hours) means faster access to your vault in a true emergency, but less time for you to dispute a wrongful or premature report. A longer window (up to two weeks) gives you more time to respond if you're unreachable but otherwise fine, at the cost of delaying access in a real crisis. Most people stay with the default and adjust only if they have a specific reason.

Your emergency contact will get an email letting them know you've designated them. They don't see anything in your vault yet, just a heads-up that you've named them. That email also explains what the role means in plain English, so you don't have to be the one to explain it.

You can add more contacts later, and you can give different contacts different waiting periods. But getting one in place today is the part that matters.

Step 4: Pick one more thing.

You've got a few minutes left. This is where you get to be strategic. Look at the rest of your vault and ask: what's the one thing my family would be most lost without? It's different for everyone. Here are some good candidates.

• Your primary checking or savings account. The everyday account where bills get paid from. Where do automatic withdrawals come out of? Where does the paycheck go? Your family doesn't need passwords to make sure those things keep working, but they need to know the account exists.
• Your life insurance policy. If you have one, this is often the single most consequential piece of information your family would need. Add the carrier, policy number, and the contact info for your agent. The Insurance tab walks you through the rest.
• One person from your professional services list. Your accountant, your lawyer, your financial advisor, your kids' dentist. Whoever your family would need to call to figure out what to do next. Add them to Professional Services.
• The location of important physical documents. Where's your passport? Where's the safe deposit box, and where's the key? Where's the title to your car? Most families don't know the answer to these questions. Each section of your vault has a place to note where the physical document lives, so use whichever section fits what you're documenting.

Pick one. Just one. The point isn't to fill in four things; it's to add one piece of real, specific information that didn't exist anywhere outside your head before today.

What to do after the first 15 minutes.

You don't have to stop at fifteen minutes. If you're in a groove, keep going for as long as it feels useful, and if you'd rather step away, that's fine too. The most common mistake is feeling like you have to finish IvorySafe in one sitting, getting frustrated, and abandoning it. It's built to come together over time, and your progress is saved, so you can always pick up where you left off.

If you do step away, a good rhythm is to come back once a week for the first month, fifteen minutes at a time. You'll keep finding things to add, and each visit makes the vault more useful. Work in whichever order feels most relevant to your life.

A note on completeness.

IvorySafe only asks about the parts of your life you told us are relevant, so you won't see sections for things that don't apply to you. Within the sections you do see, the goal is to get each one to 100%.

Every field starts out flagged as incomplete, which is helpful: it shows you exactly what is left to look at. If you don't have a piece of information on hand during a mini quiz, you can skip it and keep going. Each item you add gets its own detail view in your dashboard, and that's where you pick things back up. Sometimes a field just doesn't have an answer, like a pet's groomer who has no email address. When you open that item, you can either fill the field in or use "Mark as complete" to note there's nothing to add, and the incomplete flag clears without you inventing anything.

So 100% doesn't mean every field is filled in. It means every field you were shown is either filled in or marked complete because there was nothing to add. Most people get there in a few sessions.

Getting to 100% is worth it: it means you've thought through everything IvorySafe surfaced for your life, and your family has clear answers for what you've documented.

A few common questions.

Can I redo the onboarding quiz later?

Not right now. Re-running the onboarding quiz is something we're planning to add for major life changes (a new home, a new child, a new job), but it isn't available yet. In the meantime, you can fill in any vault section directly. Each section has its own guided mini-quizzes that walk you through what to add, so you don't have to figure it out from scratch.

How long does setting up the whole vault actually take?

Plan on about two hours total, spread across a few sittings. Most of that time is gathering the information itself, things like finding policy numbers, locating documents to upload, and remembering account details. The actual data entry is fast. After your initial setup, it's just maintenance as your life changes.

What if I'm not sure whether to include something?

Add it. The worst case is your family sees a piece of information they didn't need. The bad case is they're missing something they did.

Do I need to fill in every field?

Every field needs a response, but a response can be either filling it in or marking it complete when there is nothing to add. Any unfilled field is flagged as incomplete by default, which shows you exactly where to come back. When a field doesn't have an answer, like a contact who has no email address, click the "Mark as complete: I don't want to fill in this information" button. The incomplete marker goes away, and you can keep moving.

Is there a way to track my progress?

Each tab shows a completeness indicator so you can see what's filled in and what isn't. Aim for 100% on every tab. It may take a few sessions to get there, but it's worth it: 100% means nothing in your vault is left as an open question.