This series is based on the book Who Gets Your Passwords? TheSeniorTechie Guide To Digital Estate Planning by Paul Wilczynski - TheSeniorTechie, published by TheSeniorTechie Press.
Hal expected to be home a few days after his knee replacement. He was a retired pharmacist, and he had prepared for the recovery: prescriptions filled, meals in the freezer, a chair downstairs so he wouldn’t have to tackle the steps.
Then an infection kept him in the hospital for three weeks.
His wife, Rosalind, managed the house. When she went to pay the water bill, she couldn’t find it. There was no envelope in the usual drawer, no statement on the kitchen counter.
Hal had switched to paperless billing six years earlier. The notices went to his email account. Rosalind knew the address. She didn’t know how to get into it.
She could ask Hal, but between treatment, interrupted sleep, and pain medication, explaining account logins was not something he could reliably do that afternoon. She went home and searched the desk again.
Hal and Rosalind are composite characters, but their problem is ordinary. Nobody had died. Nobody was settling an estate. One person was temporarily unavailable, and a household task had become a guessing game.
What Belongs on the List
Your digital estate includes the accounts, files, and information you keep online or on your devices. You don’t have to own cryptocurrency or run an online business to have one.
Start with email and the websites you use for banking, investments, and bill payments. Add your photo libraries, social media accounts, and subscriptions. Include the newspaper you read online, the music service you pay for, and the cloud storage that holds your documents.
Then think about airline miles, hotel points, and credit card rewards. Add purchased ebooks, movies, and music, even though the rules for passing those along may differ from the rules for physical possessions.
Your phone, tablet, and computer belong in the discussion, too. Knowing that family pictures are on a laptop doesn’t help much if nobody can get past its sign-in screen.
Some of these accounts contain money. Others contain memories. Some simply keep the household running. All three deserve a place on your list.
Two Different Problems
Families face two separate difficulties: access and knowledge.
Access means being able to get into an account through an authorized method. A password may be part of that, but so may a phone, a verification code, or arrangements made with the service beforehand.
Knowledge means knowing the account exists.
Rosalind knew there was a water bill. She could call the utility and ask how to pay it. An account she had never heard of would be harder to find. A small balance at an online-only bank, a payment app used occasionally, or a subscription billed once a year might never come to her attention.
That’s why a list comes before a complicated discussion about passwords. Your family needs to know where to look before it can work out how to proceed.
If you’re the adult child worried about a parent, start there. “Which email address gets your bills?” is a smaller request than “Give me all your passwords.” It also leaves your parent in charge. You’re asking where information lives, not asking to take over the checking account.
What a Will Doesn’t Do
A will can state your wishes, but it doesn’t supply an email password, identify every subscription, or explain where your photographs are stored.
Older estate documents may not address digital accounts at all. Even a power of attorney needs attention to its wording and the procedures of the companies involved. Having authority to handle someone’s financial affairs and having a workable way to reach an online account are different matters.
Ask your attorney whether your documents address digital assets and access during incapacity as well as after death. Meanwhile, you can begin listing accounts without waiting for a legal appointment.
There is another complication: purchasing digital content often buys a license to use it, rather than ownership equivalent to a book on your shelf. A will cannot, by itself, make a company’s account or content license transferable.
Some services offer tools for naming trusted people or arranging access to certain data. Those tools have limits, and their purposes differ. A feature intended for use after death may do nothing during a hospital stay. The book explains those arrangements service by service; this week’s task is to identify what needs attention.
What To Do This Week
Set aside fifteen minutes and write down every online account you can remember without looking anything up. Paper is fine. So is a document on your computer. Leave passwords off this first list.
Write the names you know: your email provider, banks, utility companies, photo storage services, subscriptions, shopping accounts, and rewards programs. If you can’t remember a service’s name, write what you remember about it. “The website where I keep the old family photos” gives you something to investigate later.
Next, find out which email address receives your paperless bills. If you use several addresses, don’t assume they all go to the same one. Ask whether your trusted person knows which address matters and whether there is an authorized way for them to help if you cannot manage it yourself. An unanswered question belongs on the list, too.
Finally, tell one person you’ve started. You can say, “I’m making a list of our online accounts so you won’t have to guess if I’m in the hospital. I’ll tell you where I keep it.”
Those are the three tasks for this week. You don’t need a finished plan before that conversation.
The Rest of the Plan
Chapter One in the book also covers the different approaches companies take to digital accounts, the problem of money left undiscovered, and the work covered in the chapters that follow. The book then takes you through account inventories, access arrangements, photographs, social media, financial accounts, family conversations, and a package your family can actually use.
This first article explains why the work matters. Who Gets Your Passwords? TheSeniorTechie Guide To Digital Estate Planning provides the instructions for doing it, one chapter at a time.
