Digital Estate Planning Week 2: Find Your Forgotten Accounts
This series is based on the book Who Gets Your Passwords? TheSeniorTechie Guide To Digital Estate Planning by Paul Wilczynski, published by TheSeniorTechie Press.
Nadia brought a notebook to her father Ed’s kitchen table. She thought they could make a quick list of his online accounts before lunch.
Ed counted them on his fingers. His bank. His email. The electric company. A streaming service. Maybe the pharmacy.
“Six or seven,” he said.
Then they searched his inbox.
An old hotel welcome message reminded him of a rewards account. He had used it for years while traveling for work, then stopped traveling. There were enough points left for several nights away.
A receipt turned up a cloud storage plan he had started paying for in 2017. He thought he had canceled it when he replaced his computer.
They kept going. A genealogy website. An airline account. A second streaming service. An online store where he had bought one Christmas present.
By lunchtime, they had found forty-one accounts Ed had forgotten about.
Nadia and Ed are composite characters, but the exercise is one you can try yourself. Ed remembered the accounts he used every week. The others had accumulated over years, with no reason to think about them until someone asked for a list.
Why Memory Leaves So Much Out
Opening an account rarely feels like a decision that belongs in an estate plan. You want to order something, see a photograph, or try a service. You supply an email address, choose a password, and get on with your day.
Years later, your family may have no idea the account exists.
Chapter Two cites Bryn Mawr Trust research putting the average American’s account total at up to 250. It also reports that fewer than 15% of Americans have an estate plan addressing digital assets. Your own total may be smaller. Even twenty accounts can leave someone guessing if you have never written them down.
The first job is to identify them. Getting into them is a separate part of the plan.
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What Goes On The List
Think of your inventory as a map. It tells someone what exists and where to look for the login information. Keep the passwords themselves elsewhere.
You need four pieces of information for each account: the service name, what you use it for, where the login information lives, and whether money moves through it. That last detail includes subscriptions, account balances, and bills paid automatically.
An entry might read:
“Gmail. Main personal email and household notices. Login in my password manager. No recurring charge.”
Another could say:
“Local credit union. Checking and savings. Login to my password manager. Electric bill paid automatically.”
A third:
“Cloud photo storage. Family photos and phone backups. Login to the account notebook. Monthly charge to my credit card.”
Use descriptions that another person would understand. “The bank” will not help much if you have accounts at three banks. “My usual email” leaves your family guessing which address you mean.
A notebook is fine. So is a plain document on your computer. Choose something you will actually use, and keep it somewhere private. The format matters less than having a list someone can find and read.
Start With Your Inbox
The book calls this preparation “Day Zero.” Allow about twenty minutes for the two parts: a few inbox searches, followed by ten minutes of writing down what you remember. Open your main email account. Use its search box to look for these phrases, one at a time:
welcome
verify your email
thanks for signing up
confirm your account
Scroll through the results. You are looking for service names that make you think, “I forgot about that.”
Some messages will be advertising. Others may refer to accounts you have already closed. You do not need to settle every question now. Jot down unfamiliar names or leave the results open so you can return to them.
Resist the urge to turn this into an afternoon of account repairs. If you spend forty minutes trying to recover one old shopping login, you may never get back to the list. The book’s instructions for this first search are to see what appears and save the cleanup for later.
An old signup message is a clue. It does not prove that the account is still active or that you are still paying for it. Put a question mark beside anything uncertain.
Give Your Memory Ten Minutes
Next, open your notebook or a blank document and set a ten-minute timer.
Write down every account you can remember without looking anything up. Let them come in any order: your pharmacy, newspaper subscription, airline rewards program, Facebook, the website where you order pet food.
Include email addresses you rarely use. The book explains why these matter: an account may still be registered under an older address, which could be where password-reset messages go.
You can add the four details later if filling them in would interrupt your recall. For now, “hotel rewards, check which email” is a useful entry.
Question marks belong in a working inventory. They show you what to check next. An incomplete list gives you somewhere to resume tomorrow.
If You Are Helping A Parent
Let your parent do the searching while you take notes, if that feels more comfortable for both of you.
You can say, “I don’t need your passwords today. I’d like us to write down which companies you use.”
That keeps the task limited. Your parent does not have to hand over control of anything to tell you that an account exists. Ask before opening messages, and accept that some accounts may be private.
You could make your own list alongside theirs. You may discover that you have forgotten a few accounts yourself.
What To Do This Week
Run the four inbox searches and look through the results. Then spend ten minutes writing down the accounts you remember. Stop when the timer ends, even if the list is unfinished.
Choose where the inventory will live, put a date on it, and tell one trusted person where to find it. Keep actual passwords out of the inventory.
Chapter Two takes this first list through a seven-day plan, with one category each day. It also covers building a household inventory as a couple and keeping the information current without repeatedly starting over.
Day Zero is in this article. Days One through Seven are in Who Gets Your Passwords? TheSeniorTechie Guide To Digital Estate Planning.
