You Need To Deal With Your Digital Legacy Right Now

Digital legacy ? I thought they only took cash for those pins

 

My estate will care if the account gets hacked. It's a security issue

 

I'm a real worry

 

You shouldn't have give those "gentlemen special interest" sites all or any of your personal details.

 

The frequency with which many online services now require you to change passwords makes it fairly impractical (or at least unreliable) to maintain an up to date master list of all accounts and passwords. Using a password manager is also quite a big change if only for estate planning purposes, and I'm still a wary of security vulnerabilities for these services.

I figure that as long as you can access a person's primary email account and their phone, a moderately tech savvy person can complete a password reset for almost any other online account associated with that email. So as long as the deceased has only used one or two primary email addresses for everything, and the executor has an idea of what online services/accounts the deceased has (a search through an email inbox can help with this) the executor should be able to get by with access to these via password resets or alternative verification. Banking passwords are a bit different, but luckily financial institutions will allow an executor access and some control of accounts when you show a grant of probate or even just an original of the will.

This said, I am dreading this issue the next time I am executor, hopefully not for a long time.

 

One option is to use a password manager such as lastpass. That way you only have to remember one password and pass this on - but make sure you don't put the password in the actual will as it can become a semi-public document.

 

My broker knows all my bank and insurance details.
Wife's Gmail is my 'password recovery' email to my Gmail.
All other online accounts are linked to my Gmail.
Wouldn't this be enough?