Digital end-of-life planning: what your family needs
When my friend's dad died last year, the family spent the first week doing what you'd expect. Making phone calls. Planning the funeral. Holding each other together. But by week two, a different kind of chaos set in. His email was locked. His phone had a passcode nobody knew. There were autopay subscriptions draining his bank account, a cloud storage folder with decades of family photos no one could reach, and a brokerage account that took four months and a court order to access.
His dad wasn't careless. He had a will. He had life insurance. He'd done the traditional estate planning. But digital end of life planning? That wasn't on anyone's radar. And in 2025, that gap is enormous.
The average person has somewhere between 100 and 200 online accounts. When you die, every single one of them becomes a problem someone else has to solve. Most of your family won't even know which accounts exist, let alone how to get into them.
This is the stuff nobody talks about at the estate planning attorney's office. But it's the stuff that actually keeps your family up at night in those first few months.
The accounts your family will need immediately
Not all accounts are created equal when it comes to urgency. Some can wait. Others become emergencies within days.
Email is the master key. Your primary email account is the single most important digital asset you have, because it's how you reset passwords for everything else. If your family can't get into your email, they're locked out of a chain of accounts that could take months to untangle. If you do nothing else after reading this, make sure someone you trust can access your email.
Banking and financial accounts come next. Bills don't stop when someone dies. The mortgage, the electric bill, the car payment. Your family needs access to at least one bank account to keep the household running while probate grinds along. If your banking is entirely online with no local branch, this gets harder. If you use a fintech app like Chime or Cash App as your primary account, it gets much harder.
Then there's the phone. A locked smartphone is a vault that holds two-factor authentication codes, text messages, photos, and app access. Without the passcode or biometric access, your family may need to petition Apple or Google directly, which can take weeks or months.
After those three, the urgency drops but the list gets long: social media accounts, cloud storage, streaming subscriptions, domain names, cryptocurrency wallets, loyalty accounts with real balances, digital purchases like ebooks and music libraries. Each one is a small problem. Together they're overwhelming.
What happens when nobody has the passwords
Here's what most people don't realize: companies are not on your family's side in this situation. They're on the side of account security, which means they're designed to keep everyone out, including your grieving spouse.
Apple will require a court order to access a deceased person's Apple ID. Google has an Inactive Account Manager that works well, but only if you set it up before you die. Facebook lets you appoint a Legacy Contact, but that person can't read your messages or download your photos without a special request. Most banks will freeze accounts the moment they're notified of a death, even if your spouse is a joint account holder on other accounts.
The pattern is the same everywhere: without advance planning, access requires legal paperwork, long wait times, and a lot of emotional energy your family doesn't have to spare.
I've heard from families who spent months trying to access a loved one's iCloud photos, only to discover that Apple's Digital Legacy program could have solved it in minutes if it had been activated beforehand. That's the kind of gap digital end of life planning is meant to close.
How to build your digital end of life plan
You don't need special software or a weekend retreat to do this. You need an afternoon, some honesty about how many accounts you actually have, and a system for passing that information to someone you trust.
Start with a full inventory. Open your email and search for "welcome to," "verify your account," or "subscription confirmation." You'll be surprised how many accounts surface. Go through your browser's saved passwords. Check your phone's app library. Write down every account that involves money, identity, memories, or access to other accounts.
For each account, note the email address you used to register, the username if it's different, and whether you use two-factor authentication. You don't necessarily need to write down every password if you use a password manager, but you do need to make sure someone can get into that password manager.
Pick a digital executor. This is the person who will handle your digital life after you die. It might be the same person as your traditional executor, or it might not. Your estate attorney might be great with property law but lost when it comes to recovering a crypto wallet. Pick someone who's comfortable with technology and who you trust with sensitive information. Then actually tell them you've chosen them and where to find your instructions.
Set up the built-in tools. Apple, Google, and Facebook all have legacy or inactive account features. None of them are turned on by default. Take thirty minutes and activate all three:
- Apple: Settings > Your Name > Sign-In & Security > Legacy Contact
- Google: myaccount.google.com > Data & Privacy > Inactive Account Manager
- Facebook: Settings > Memorialization Settings > Legacy Contact
These won't cover everything, but they'll prevent the worst lockout scenarios.
Store your plan securely. A spreadsheet on your desktop isn't going to cut it, because your family might not be able to get into your computer. And a printed list in a safe deposit box creates its own access problems. You need something that's both secure and accessible to the right people at the right time. If you're thinking about how to do this well, the guide on safely storing legacy documents with end-to-end encryption goes deep on the options.
The accounts people forget about
Everyone remembers their bank account and email. Fewer people think about these:
Subscriptions with recurring charges. Spotify, Netflix, gym memberships, SaaS tools, meal kits, app subscriptions. These charges will keep hitting your credit card or bank account for months if nobody cancels them. Some families don't discover them until they see the credit card statements weeks later.
Domain names and websites. If you own a domain name, it will expire and potentially be grabbed by someone else if the registration isn't renewed. If you run a small business website, a blog, or a side project, someone needs to know where it's hosted and how to keep it running or shut it down intentionally.
Cryptocurrency. This is the one that scares estate attorneys, and for good reason. If you die without sharing your wallet's seed phrase or private key, that money is gone. Not frozen, not recoverable through a court order. Gone. There is no customer support line for the Bitcoin blockchain. If you hold any amount of crypto, your seed phrase needs to be stored somewhere your executor can find it. The top 5 documents you should leave for your family includes a good framework for organizing this kind of information.
Photos and cloud storage. For many families, the photos are worth more than the money. Your iCloud library, Google Photos archive, Dropbox folders full of vacation pictures and kids' milestones. If these are locked behind an account nobody can access, they're effectively lost. Don't let that happen.
Work accounts. If you're self-employed or run a business, your clients, contracts, and intellectual property might live entirely in digital accounts. Your family or business partner needs a path to those.
Tell someone where to find it all
The best digital end of life plan in the world is useless if nobody knows it exists. This is where most people stall out. They do the work of inventorying and organizing, but they never actually tell anyone.
You don't need to hand your spouse a spreadsheet of passwords over dinner. But you do need to have a conversation that covers three things: that you've created a plan, where it's stored, and how to access it. That's it. Fifteen minutes of mild awkwardness that could save your family months of frustration.
If the conversation feels too heavy, you might frame it the way you'd frame any other practical household task. You wouldn't feel weird telling your partner where the circuit breaker panel is. This is the same idea, just for your digital life. For more on how to approach this, there's a thoughtful breakdown of best practices for sharing information with loved ones.
And if you want to go beyond passwords and account access, consider leaving some context too. Why certain accounts matter. What files are sentimental versus practical. Any wishes you have about your social media profiles after you're gone. A guide on why important information should be securely stored for your loved ones makes a good case for thinking about this more broadly.
Start smaller than you think you should
If this all feels like a lot, here's my honest advice: don't try to do everything at once. Do these three things this week and you'll be ahead of 95% of people:
- Write down your email password and phone passcode. Put them in a sealed envelope and give it to someone you trust.
- Turn on Google's Inactive Account Manager and Apple's Legacy Contact.
- Tell one person that you've done this and why.
That's thirty minutes of work. You can build the full plan over time. But those three steps alone will prevent the worst-case scenarios, the ones where your family is locked out of everything and has to hire lawyers just to access your photos.
Digital end of life planning isn't about being morbid. It's about being practical. It's the same instinct that makes you buy life insurance or write a will, just applied to the part of your life that actually runs on screens and passwords now.
When I Die Files gives you a secure, private place to organize exactly this kind of information and make sure the right people can access it when the time comes.