The pre-travel phone-loss checklist
Losing a phone abroad is either an errand or a crisis, and the difference is decided the week before you leave. Twelve items, about forty-five minutes, most of them one-offs. Print it, put it on the fridge, tick the boxes with a pen like it's 1995.
Learn three numbers by heart. Your person, one backup person, and your bank's card-freeze line. Contacts apps have made everyone's memory lazy - ten minutes of actual memorising beats an hour of panic at a borrowed phone.
Get your 2FA backup codes off the phone. Email, Apple or Google account, banking. Backup codes that live only inside the authenticator app on the phone you just lost are not backup codes. Print them, or keep them somewhere a borrowed browser can reach.
Write down your IMEI. Dial *#06# and note the 15-digit number. Police reports and carrier blocks both ask for it, and almost nobody knows theirs.
Turn on Find My or Find Hub - and test it. Then log in once at icloud.com/find or android.com/find from a real browser. The first time you use it should not be the time it matters.
Set a SIM PIN. Without one, your SIM works in any other phone - and whoever holds it receives your SMS login codes. A four-digit PIN closes that door.
Note your carrier's lost-SIM hotline. The number that blocks your SIM and moves your number to a replacement. It needs to be callable from a phone that isn't yours, which means it can't only live in yours.
Note your travel insurance hotline and policy number. Most policies want the loss reported within 24 to 48 hours. The policy PDF in your inbox doesn't help if your inbox is locked behind the lost phone.
Scan your passport - and know where the scan lives. A copy speeds up an emergency travel document enormously. Keep a paper copy in your luggage too, stored away from the passport itself.
Know how to freeze each card without the app. The freeze button lives in the banking app, which lives on the missing phone. Note each bank's stolen-card phone line - they answer around the clock.
Check what your lock screen shows. If message previews appear while the phone is locked, a thief can read your SMS codes without your passcode. Turn previews off before you travel.
Leave your itinerary with someone at home. Hotel names and dates. If your phone is gone, this is how someone reaches you - hotels are happy to pass on a message.
Put the whole plan somewhere a browser can reach. Everything above is useless if it exists only in the phone. A printed sheet in your luggage works. An encrypted recovery page you can open from any borrowed device also works - that's what nowwhat.page is, and it's one option among several. The only wrong place is the phone alone.