Free guide · ~30 minutes
Bank accounts. Photos. Passwords. Cloud storage. Most of it permanently locked away — not because the providers are cruel, but because they're designed to refuse access to anyone who isn't you. That's a fixable problem. Here's the opinionated 30-minute version. No lawyers needed.
In this guide
01 · APPLE
Settings → [your name] → Sign-In & Security → Legacy Contact. Pick someone you trust. Your phone generates an access key tied to them.
When they present that key plus a death certificate, your entire iCloud opens — photos, messages, notes, files. Without this, Apple's default answer is "no."
Most people don't know this exists. It was added in iOS 15.2 and lives four taps deep in Settings.
02 · GOOGLE
Go to myaccount.google.com/inactive. Choose how long Google waits before acting (3, 6, 12, or 18 months of inactivity). Then designate up to 10 trusted contacts and decide what each can access — Gmail, Drive, Photos, YouTube, separately.
Google warns you with multiple emails and SMS before triggering. False positives are very rare.
03 · PASSWORD MANAGER
This is the master key to almost everything else. 1Password, Bitwarden, Dashlane, and LastPass all have an "emergency access" or "recovery contact" feature, usually buried in account settings.
Add a contact, set a waiting period (7 days is common), and if you don't decline the request in that window, the vault unlocks for them.
If you don't use a password manager yet, this is the moment to start. Sorting passwords without one is roughly impossible.
04 · SOCIAL ACCOUNTS
Facebook: Settings → Accounts Center → Personal Details → Account Ownership and Control → Memorialization. Assign a Legacy Contact (who can manage the memorialized profile but not read your messages), or set the account to auto-delete.
Instagram uses the same Meta setting. X / Twitter only offers deactivation by next-of-kin request, no advance setup.
05 · YOUR PHONE'S PIN
Every 2FA code your family will ever need lives behind that 4-to-6-digit number. Without it, none of the above matters: they can't even sign in once the verification codes start arriving.
Tell one person verbally, or write it down and keep it with your important documents. Don't put it in the password manager — that's circular.
If you stopped after Part 1 you'd already be ahead of 95% of people. These five are where the rest fall through — including the single most expensive miss in the entire list.
06 · CRYPTO — THE BIGGEST MISS
If you hold any cryptocurrency in a self-custody wallet (Ledger, Trezor, MetaMask, Phantom, anything), the seed phrase is the asset. Lose it and the money is gone. Permanently. No appeals, no recovery — Chainalysis estimates roughly 20% of all Bitcoin is in wallets nobody can open anymore.
The rule: write the seed phrase on paper or metal, store it somewhere physical (a safe, a deposit box), and tell someone it exists and where. Never put it in a password manager, cloud note, email, or photo. Hardware wallet in one place; seed phrase in another.
Even sophisticated people get this wrong. The seed phrase is the single biggest difference between digital legacy planning in 2026 vs. ten years ago.
07 · 2FA BACKUP CODES
Most services (Google, GitHub, banks, exchanges) generate one-time backup codes when you turn on 2FA. Almost nobody saves them. Without them, if your phone is lost or wiped, you can't get into accounts even if you have the password.
Generate them now, print them, file them with your one-page sheet (below).
08 · DOMAINS & ONLINE BUSINESSES
A domain you registered for €12/year can be your most valuable digital asset. Same for an Etsy shop, a Stripe balance, a Substack, a YouTube channel earning ad revenue, an iOS App Store developer account. These have real money flowing through them and they're almost always invisible to family.
Add the registrar, the account login source (which email), and what each one is for.
09 · SUBSCRIPTIONS TO CANCEL
This is the inverse problem: bills that keep coming. Netflix, Spotify, iCloud storage, gym, Substacks, the SaaS tools nobody remembers you signed up for. Months of charges after death is a quiet, common pain.
You don't need passwords here — just the list, so someone knows what to contact.
10 · BANK, BROKERAGE, INSURANCE
Banks, brokerages (including the small ones), pension accounts, retirement accounts, insurance policies (life, home, health, vehicle), and any active loans. You don't need passwords — you need existence and location.
Insurance is the most underrated: millions of euros in life insurance payouts go unclaimed every year worldwide simply because beneficiaries didn't know a policy existed.
Everything above only works if it's findable. Take 15 minutes and put the following on a single sheet of paper (yes, paper):
Make two copies. One in a fireproof box at home, one with someone you'd trust to handle this — a sibling, a spouse, your lawyer, a notary. Not in the cloud. Not as a Word file on your desktop. Paper.
Research from estate planners is brutally consistent: 83% of people who make a digital legacy plan never update it. Within a year the passwords have rotated, the accounts have multiplied, the named contacts have moved away. The plan that felt complete in March is half-useless by next January.
The fix is embarrassingly simple: pick a date each year — your birthday, January 1st, the first Sunday after taxes are due — and spend 15 minutes refreshing the sheet. Add a calendar reminder. That single recurring 15-minute check beats every sophisticated tool that goes unmaintained.
Bonus move: at that same annual check-in, write a short letter to someone you love and seal it for a future date. Same desk, same 15 minutes. The legacy paperwork tells people what you left. The letter tells them who you were.
Most digital legacy advice stops at the accounts. The hardest part — the words your family will actually want to read — is the one nobody plans for. We built a guided "Instructions" capsule that walks you through the same prompts above, then ends with the words only you can write.
Write the Instructions capsule →Free · encrypted before it leaves your device · opens on the date you choose