Accounts nobody else can reach

What follows is the working version of digital accounts after death: the decisions in the order you actually meet them, with the reasoning attached.

Paperless means invisible

Accounts that send nothing by post leave no trail for a family to follow, which is precisely how assets go unclaimed. Two-factor authentication tied to one person's phone compounds it, since the phone is often locked and eventually disconnected.

Executors regularly report spending months establishing what somebody actually held, with no reliable way to be certain they found everything. The problem grows with each year that more of household finance moves online and less arrives on paper. It is entirely solvable, and the solution is a list rather than anything technical.

A list of where, not a list of passwords

What a family actually needs is an inventory of institutions and account types, not credentials, which raise legal and security problems. Sharing passwords typically breaches a provider's terms and does not confer any legal authority to operate an account.

Executors and attorneys deal with providers through formal bereavement or authority processes rather than by logging in. The list should include banks, pensions, investments, insurance, subscriptions, utilities and any business interests. Kept in one place and mentioned to the right person, it removes the largest practical obstacle a family faces.

Password managers and legacy features

Many password managers and some large technology providers offer an emergency access or legacy contact facility designed for exactly this. These typically allow a nominated person to gain access after a delay, which balances security against the practical need. They are still relatively little used, and setting one up takes a few minutes and requires telling the nominated person.

Whether such access is legally sufficient for any particular account is a separate question and depends on the provider and jurisdiction. The useful role they play is practical: recovering the phone, the email account and the paperwork rather than operating finances.

The email account is the master key

Most account recovery flows run through email, which makes that account more consequential than any individual financial one. A family that can access the email can identify institutions from correspondence even without a list. A family locked out of it faces a considerably harder task, and providers vary enormously in how they handle such requests.

The useful part is this: this is a strong argument for the email account being covered by whatever legacy arrangement you set up.

It is also a reason not to use a work email address for personal financial matters, since that access ends with the job.

Things that stop and things that keep charging

Subscriptions continue billing after a death until somebody cancels them, and identifying them all is one of the more tedious tasks an executor faces. Some digital assets, including certain purchased media and accounts with stored value, may not be transferable at all under provider terms. Businesses run online, domains and any income-generating accounts need specific attention and are frequently overlooked entirely.

The useful part is this: photographs and personal records held only in one account are not financial and are often what the family most wants recovered. Noting which of these exist, in the same list, costs nothing extra.

Do it for the living case as well

The same problem arises when somebody is seriously ill, incapacitated or simply abroad and unreachable, and it arises far more often. A household where one person handles everything online is one illness away from being unable to pay its own bills. Legal authority to act during someone's lifetime comes through a power of attorney rather than through a will or a password.

Put simply, setting that up alongside the inventory covers both situations with one afternoon of work. Most households never do either, and the ones that have describe it as the least regretted admin they have completed.

The takeaway

Write down where the accounts are, not how to log in, and make sure the email is covered.

The version you keep doing is the version that works.