Passing on Your Passwords as Part of Your Estate

Passing on Your Passwords as Part of Your Estate

When contemplating wills and estates, it’s no longer enough to leave behind information about the location of your safe-deposit box or the name of your lawyer. In this increasingly digital world, what’s even more important is letting your next of kin know the user names and passwords to your online accounts.

Don’t just provide such information about your financial accounts, but to all crucial Internet sites—that is, places where you have the ability to access or post information. After all, many of us increasingly spend much of our lives online. All that work you did tracing your family’s history, which now resides on a genealogy website, could be lost, as well as the family photos you saved online in a cloud.

Household bills could go unpaid if the co-owner doesn’t know the password to the local utility’s site, or credit card bills could pile up. Just as crucial, automatically paid accounts may continue making payments unnecessarily because loved ones don’t have online access to your bank account. Your spouse or children might be able to use your frequent-purchaser rewards points—if they knew the websites, user names and passwords.

If something were to happen to you, your descendants may want access to your personal or professional websites and blogs. Loved ones may want to contact friends or associates on social media sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+ and Twitter.

Where to Keep Your Passwords

What’s the best way of ensuring your survivors will be able to access your accounts and websites? There’s the old-fashioned way of writing them down—either keeping them on a piece of paper or creating an online document. Make sure your executor knows the location of your password storage system, whether in a file cabinet or the hard drive on your computer. Some lawyers recommend including instructions about accounts and passwords in your will.

Most web browsers have systems that track saved passwords and corresponding websites.

Password Manager

Several websites will store your passwords, providing convenience for you and your beneficiaries, because you only need to remember and share one password.

The person you entrust with this information can be a personal representative, the executor you name in your will or a beneficiary. If you use a website that isn’t tailored to after-death situations, you’ll have to provide the executor with the password while you’re alive. Therefore, it’s important to find someone trustworthy who won’t try to cause harm by accessing your personal information before you die.

Password manager sites protect your information with data-encryption tools, and many sites store a limited number of passwords for free. LastPass states that your data is “never shared with LastPass. Your data stays accessible only to you. It works by prompting you to save your logins, generating new passwords.”

Other password storage sites (from PC Mag, gigaom and Mocavo) include Dashlane, Passpack.com and PasswordBox. PasswordBox includes a “Legacy Vault to easily pass on your digital asset.” You provide PasswordBox with the name of your trusted beneficiary (and their email address), and when you die, the beneficiary notifies PasswordBox and supplies a death certificate before receiving the digital assets (in the form of passwords).

Similarly, Lifetime Vault provides a “vault key” that you give to your loved ones, which gives them access to your accounts and documents if you become disabled or die.