Keep track of renewals: car insurance, MOT, passports

Car insurance. The MOT. A passport that expires the summer you were planning to travel.

These are the jobs nobody forgets permanently — they just remember three days too late, when the choice is gone and the price has gone up.

Renewals is a short list of those dates, each one exact because you typed it in.

Adding one

More → Renewals → Add.

You need two things:

• What renews — in your own words. “Car insurance”, “Ada’s passport”, “Boiler cover”.
• When it is due — the date itself.

Then choose how much warning you want, under Show as Coming up: 30 days, 2, 3 or 6 months before. A month suits insurance, where the value is in having time to shop around. A passport wants far longer. This is how early it is marked on the list; nothing is sent to your phone.

You can add a note as well — the provider, a policy number, where the paperwork lives. It is there for the moment you actually sit down to do it.

What happens next

Nothing, until it gets close.

Once the date is inside the warning you chose, it is marked Coming up on the list, beside its exact date and a precise countdown.

No notification is sent. You see Coming up when you open More → Renewals, so it is worth a look now and then. Nothing is added to your calendar and nobody is assigned anything: it is a list to check, not a job.

When something is overdue

It stays on the list, moves to the top, and is marked Overdue in red.

It does not quietly roll forward to next year. An insurance renewal you missed is the single most useful thing this screen can tell you, and tidying it away would turn a real problem into a neat-looking list.

When you have renewed it

Tap Renewed and confirm the next date.

Equal House offers a year ahead as the starting point, because that is what most renewals do — but it only ever offers it. A passport is ten years, a service plan might be eighteen months, and Equal House will not assume a pattern on your behalf. You confirm the date, so it cannot silently be wrong a year from now.

A note on documents

Renewals are deliberately separate from family documents, and it is worth knowing why.

A document’s expiry date means “delete this then” — Equal House removes expired documents automatically. A renewal date means “this falls due then”, and it stays on the list until you mark it renewed. Storing one as the other would eventually destroy a policy document on the very day you needed it.

So keep the paperwork in documents, and the date here.