What Happens to Your Accounts After You Die, and How to Arrange It Now

This is a chore rather than a morbid subject, and it is one of the few where an afternoon of work saves someone else weeks of frustration at the worst possible time.

Most people who deal with it are dealing with it for a parent, with no access, no list, and a set of companies whose processes assume the account holder is available.

General information, not legal advice. Anything involving a will, an estate or an executor's authority should be set up with the person handling your affairs.

Why it is harder than it should be

Passwords cannot simply be handed over. Sharing them is usually against the terms of service, and — more practically — the accounts that matter are protected by a code sent to a phone that is now locked.

Companies will not talk to you without documentation, and each one wants something different.

The phone is the key to everything. Whoever cannot unlock it cannot receive the verification codes that open the email, which opens everything else.

Photographs are the loss people feel most. Not the accounts, not the subscriptions. Decades of family photographs sitting in cloud storage nobody can reach.

The three things that make the difference

If you do nothing else on this page, do these.

1. Set up a legacy contact on your phone and main accounts. This is the mechanism built specifically for the problem, and it works without sharing any password.

2. Make sure someone can unlock your phone. A passcode written down and stored securely — with a will, in a safe, with the person who will handle your affairs. Not in a note on the phone itself.

3. Write a list of what exists. Not passwords. Just what accounts there are and where. This alone removes most of the difficulty.

Setting up a legacy contact

Apple. Settings → your name → Sign-In & Security → Legacy Contact. You choose a person, and they receive an access key. After your death, with the key and a death certificate, they can access your account, including photographs. This takes about three minutes and is the single most useful item here for anyone with an iPhone.

Google. The setting is called Inactive Account Manager, at myaccount.google.com. You choose how long of inactivity counts, who is notified, what they can download, and whether the account is then deleted. It covers Gmail, Photos, Drive and everything else in one place.

Facebook. Settings → Memorialisation. You can name a legacy contact who can manage a memorialised profile, or choose to have the account deleted.

Microsoft, Amazon, Instagram and others have their own processes, generally requiring documentation after the fact rather than a contact set up in advance.

Password managers are the notable exception in a good way: most have an emergency access feature that grants a nominated person access after a waiting period. If you use one, set this up.

Making the list

The most valuable and least technical thing you can do.

What to include:

• Email accounts — the important ones, because everything else resets through them
• Where photographs are stored
• Financial: bank, investments, pension, insurance
• Subscriptions and recurring payments. See subscriptions
• Utilities and phone accounts
• Any social media
• Domain names, websites, or anything with an annual renewal
• Where the phone passcode is kept
• Whether a password manager is used, and where its emergency access is set up

What not to include: the passwords themselves. A list of accounts is useful to your family and useless to a thief. A list of passwords is the reverse.

Where to keep it: with your will, in a safe, or with the person handling your affairs. Update it once a year — a birthday works as a reminder.

The photographs

Worth treating separately, because it is what people actually grieve losing.

Do not leave them only in cloud storage. However good the legacy arrangements, an account is a single point of failure.

Put the ones that matter somewhere physical. An external drive, a computer, or printed. This is the only version that survives an account being closed, a password being lost, or a company changing its policy.

Tell someone where they are.

Consider shared albums now, so that the people who would want them already have them. See sharing photos with family.

Subscriptions and recurring payments

These continue after death and are a recurring source of frustration for families.

The list matters here. Cancelling requires knowing what exists, and a bank statement only shows names that are frequently unrecognisable.

Annual subscriptions are the worst, because they can charge months later with nobody expecting it.

If you are handling this for someone else

Start with the phone. If you can unlock it, most other things become possible. If you cannot, it is worth trying the obvious codes early — after a number of failed attempts some phones lock permanently.

Then the email. Whoever controls the main email account can reset most other services.

Get multiple copies of the death certificate. Every company wants one, and several will not return it.

Expect it to take months, and expect different companies to want different things. This is normal and not a sign you are doing it wrong.

Download before you close. Photographs, documents, anything worth keeping. Closing an account frequently deletes the contents immediately and irreversibly.

Watch for fraud. Death notices are used to target estates and bereaved families. Anyone contacting you about an unpaid debt, an unclaimed benefit or a recovery service should be verified independently. See the first two hours after you realise.

A word about wills

Digital accounts sit awkwardly in estate law, and the arrangements above work alongside a will rather than instead of one.

Do not list passwords in a will. Wills can become public documents, and they are written long before they are read.

Do name someone to handle digital matters, and tell them where the list is.

Take advice if anything digital has real value — a business, a domain, a monetised channel, cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency in particular is unrecoverable without the keys, and a significant amount has been lost this way permanently.

The afternoon version

If you do this once and never look at it again:

• [ ] Legacy contact set on your phone account — three minutes
• [ ] Inactive Account Manager set on Google — ten minutes
• [ ] Phone passcode written down and stored with your will
• [ ] A one-page list of what accounts exist and where
• [ ] Photographs copied somewhere that is not only an online account
• [ ] Told one person that all of the above exists

An afternoon, once. Everyone who has done it for a parent without it wishes it had been there.

For additional public information on everyday cybersecurity, see Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.