When someone dies today, their family inherits a house, a car, some accounts, and about two hundred logins. The photos are in a cloud account nobody can open. The utility bills are on autopay from an email nobody can read. A subscription keeps charging a card for a year. The crypto, if there is any, is gone for good.
None of this is in the will, because wills were not written for it. Here is what actually happens to each kind of account, what the platforms allow, and the one simple thing you can do about it.
Why a list of passwords is the wrong answer
The first instinct is to write every password down and put the list in the safe or, worse, in the will. Three problems.
A will becomes a public court record in probate. Anything in it can be read by anyone who asks.
Passwords change. The list is wrong within a year, and the person who needs it will not know which entries are stale.
Using someone's password after they die is, in most places, technically unauthorized access to a computer system, even for a spouse with the best intentions. Most platform terms of service forbid it. It usually works and rarely causes trouble, but it puts your executor in a gray area at the worst possible time.
What your executor actually needs is not your keys. It is a map: what accounts exist, where the access information lives, and what you want done with each one. The access itself should go through the platform's own legacy process or through your password manager's emergency access, which exist precisely for this.
Email is the master key to everything else, because every other account resets its password through it. Google offers Inactive Account Manager: you choose a period of inactivity (three months, say), name up to ten people, and decide whether they receive a copy of your data or whether the account is simply deleted. Set it up once and it runs by itself. Apple has a Legacy Contact for your Apple account that covers mail, photos, notes, and more; the contact needs an access key you generate and a death certificate. Microsoft has a next of kin process that is slower and more paperwork heavy.
If you do nothing, most providers will close the account after a period of inactivity and the data is gone. Set up the inactive account tool. It takes ten minutes.
Photos
The thing families miss most, and the thing most often lost. If your photos live with Apple or Google, the legacy contact or inactive account process above covers them. If they live on a phone that nobody can unlock, they may be gone; Apple will not unlock a device without a court order, and even then it is uncertain. Back them up somewhere a legacy contact can reach, or export the important ones to a place you control.
Banking and investments
These are the accounts a will and a trust already handle, and the executor or trustee can reach them with a death certificate and letters from the court. Online access is not the problem. The problem is knowing they exist. A brokerage account opened online with statements delivered by email leaves no paper trail; if nobody knows about it, nobody claims it. Your map needs the institution and the account's existence, not the login.
Autopay, subscriptions, and recurring charges
Streaming, software, a gym, a newspaper, cloud storage, the domain name for a side business. Each one keeps charging until someone cancels, and canceling without the login is slow. A list of what charges which card each month, kept with your important papers, lets your executor stop the bleeding in an afternoon. Your bank statements are the easiest place to build that list.
Social media
Facebook lets you name a legacy contact who can manage a memorialized profile or ask for the account to be deleted. Instagram can memorialize an account on request. X and LinkedIn will close accounts for a relative with documentation. Decide now whether you want a memorialized page or nothing, and write it down. Your family will not want to guess.
Crypto
Cryptocurrency is the one asset that is truly gone if the keys are lost. There is no customer service to call. If you hold crypto, your executor needs to know it exists, where the wallet or exchange account is, and how to reach the seed phrase or hardware wallet. That seed phrase should be stored like cash, physically, somewhere a trusted person can reach after your death and not before. Do not type it into a digital inventory.
Domains, websites, and a business
A domain name expires and is bought by someone else. A website goes dark. A small business's online storefront, payment processor, and accounting software all need someone with authority to step in. If you run a business, your digital assets inventory is part of your succession plan, and your attorney should know where it is.
Devices and the password manager
If you use a password manager, you have already solved most of this. Every manager worth using has an emergency access or legacy feature: you name a person, set a waiting period, and if you do not refuse their request within that period, they get in. That is the right way to hand over access, because it is authorized by you in advance and it works even when passwords change. Set it up, and tell the person you named.
Your phone and laptop passcodes are the exception. Those you may want to leave physically, in a sealed envelope with your important papers, because they unlock the two factor codes everything else depends on.
Leave a map, not a key
Put it together and the task is smaller than it looks:
- A list of your accounts by type: email, social, financial, crypto, subscriptions, photos and cloud, domains, devices, password manager.
- For each: where the access information lives (the password manager, the legacy contact, a sealed envelope, the exchange) and what you want done: keep, close, memorialize, transfer.
- A checklist of the four legacy settings worth turning on today: Apple Legacy Contact, Google Inactive Account Manager, Facebook legacy contact, and your password manager's emergency access.
- Never a password in the list itself.
That is exactly what the digital assets inventory in Legacy Guard holds, and it is built the same way: an inventory of accounts with where the access lives and what should happen, plus the four item checklist, and a rule written across the top that says never store passwords here. The inventory is private to the person who made it and encrypted on their device; it reaches the people they chose only after a verified passing. Your attorney sees that the inventory exists and nothing in it.
The ten minute version
If you do one thing after reading this, turn on Google's Inactive Account Manager or Apple's Legacy Contact for your main email, whichever you use. Email is the master key, and that one setting means your family can open the door without ever needing your password.