Legacy records software: what I wish existed when my family needed it

When my uncle passed away, my aunt spent three weeks trying to piece together their financial life. She knew roughly what they had, the way you know roughly what's in your kitchen cabinets. But the specifics — account numbers, passwords, policy details, where the deed to the house was filed — all of that lived in his head and in a system of folders and sticky notes that made sense to exactly one person.

He wasn't careless. He just never found a good place to put it all. And honestly, neither have most of us.

That experience sent me down a rabbit hole of trying to find the right legacy records software, some tool or system that could hold the important documents, passwords, and personal files a family actually needs when someone dies or becomes incapacitated. What I found was a landscape of imperfect options, each solving part of the problem and ignoring the rest. Here's what I've learned.

The spreadsheet approach (and why people start here)

Let's be honest: most people who try to organize their legacy records start with a spreadsheet. You open Google Sheets or Excel, create columns for account names, usernames, passwords, and notes, and start filling it in. It feels productive. It feels organized.

And for a while, it works fine.

The problem shows up later. A spreadsheet doesn't remind you to update it when you change a password. It doesn't have any real security unless you add it yourself. It sits in your Google Drive or on your desktop, and if nobody knows it's there — or nobody has the password to your Google account — it might as well not exist.

I've seen families use spreadsheets successfully, but only when the person maintaining it was disciplined about updates and had explicitly told someone else where to find it and how to access it. That's a narrow set of conditions. Most of us change a bank password, mean to update the spreadsheet, and never get around to it.

The spreadsheet is a starting point, not a solution. If it's all you have right now, that's fine. But it's worth knowing what else is out there.

Password managers as legacy records software

Password managers like 1Password, Bitwarden, and LastPass are genuinely useful tools for storing account credentials, and some of them have started adding features aimed at legacy planning. 1Password has an emergency kit and lets you share vaults. Bitwarden has an emergency access feature where a trusted contact can request access to your vault, and if you don't respond within a set number of days, they get in.

These are real, well-designed features. And if your main concern is making sure someone can log into your accounts after you're gone, a password manager gets you about 70% of the way there.

But here's the gap: password managers are built for credentials, not for context. They'll store your bank login, but they won't store the letter explaining which accounts to close, which to keep open, and who your financial advisor is. They won't hold your legacy letters, your funeral wishes, or the story behind the savings account you set up for your granddaughter's education. They're a vault for data, not for meaning.

The other issue is that your family has to know the password manager exists and understand how to use it. I've watched my mother try to navigate 1Password. She's a smart woman. She gave up after ten minutes and asked me to just print everything out.

If you already use a password manager, take the time to set up its emergency access features. But don't kid yourself that it replaces a real plan for your legacy documents. There's a real difference between legacy document storage and traditional file storage, and password managers land squarely on the traditional side.

Cloud drives: better than nothing, worse than you think

Google Drive. Dropbox. iCloud. OneDrive. You probably already use one of these for everyday file storage, and the temptation is to just create a "Legacy" or "Important Documents" folder and dump everything in there.

I did this for a while. I had a folder in Google Drive called "If Something Happens" with scanned copies of our wills, insurance policies, and a text file with account information. It felt responsible.

Then I thought about what would actually happen if I got hit by a bus. My wife would need to get into my Google account first, which means she'd need my password or access to my recovery email. Then she'd need to find the right folder among the dozens I'd created over the years. Then she'd need to figure out which documents were current and which were outdated versions I'd forgotten to delete.

Cloud drives are general-purpose tools. They store files. They don't organize them for the specific use case of "someone other than me needs to find critical information during the worst week of their life." They don't have built-in features for delivery triggers, trusted contacts, or secure sharing that activates under specific conditions.

They're a reasonable backup location. But as a primary system for legacy records, they leave too much to chance.

Dedicated legacy planning platforms

This is where things get more interesting and more complicated. There's a growing category of software built specifically for end-of-life and legacy planning. These platforms are designed around the actual problem: storing sensitive documents and personal messages so that the right people can access them at the right time.

What sets these apart from a cloud drive or password manager is intent. A good legacy records platform thinks about questions like: Who should see this document, and when? What happens if the platform itself goes out of business? How do you balance security with accessibility — keeping records private while you're alive but reachable when you're not?

Some of these platforms focus on the legal and financial side: storing wills, powers of attorney, insurance information, and account details. Others focus more on the personal side: legacy letters, family stories, recorded messages, life advice for children and grandchildren. The best ones try to handle both, because in practice, a family dealing with a death needs the practical and the personal at the same time.

The trade-offs with dedicated platforms are real, though. You're trusting a company with your most sensitive information, so end-to-end encryption matters a lot. You're also betting that the company will be around in ten, twenty, or thirty years. That's a bet worth scrutinizing. Ask about their data export options. Ask what happens to your data if they shut down. If they can't answer those questions clearly, move on.

And then there's the adoption problem. The best legacy platform in the world is useless if you set up an account, upload a few documents in a burst of motivation, and then never log in again. Any tool you choose has to be one you'll actually maintain.

What to actually look for in legacy records software

After trying half a dozen approaches, here's what I think matters most when you're evaluating legacy records software for your family.

Security that doesn't require a computer science degree. End-to-end encryption is the baseline. But the interface needs to be simple enough that both you and your loved ones can use it without a tutorial. If your spouse or adult children can't figure out how to access the records when they need them, the security is working against you.

A way to organize by purpose, not just by file type. You don't want a list of PDFs. You want sections like "financial accounts," "insurance," "medical directives," "letters to family," and "digital accounts." The organization should reflect how someone will actually use the information in an emergency.

Delivery or access controls. The ability to designate trusted contacts and set conditions for when they can access your records. Maybe it's immediate. Maybe it's after a certain period of inactivity. Maybe it's triggered by a specific event. This is the feature that separates legacy-specific software from general file storage.

Room for the personal stuff. Account numbers are necessary. But so are the letters you write to your kids, the explanation of why you made certain decisions, the stories you want passed down. The best legacy records software gives you a place for the information your loved ones actually need, both the practical and the emotional.

Regular reminders to update. Life changes. You refinance the house, switch banks, update your will, change a beneficiary. Whatever system you use needs to nudge you periodically to review and update your records. Otherwise you end up with a beautifully organized set of outdated information.

The approach that's actually working for me

I'm going to be honest: I don't use a single tool. I use a combination, and it's not perfect, but it covers the bases.

My day-to-day passwords live in a password manager with emergency access set up for my wife. Our legal documents — wills, trusts, powers of attorney — exist as physical copies with our attorney and as encrypted digital backups. Our financial account information, insurance details, and medical directives are in a dedicated legacy platform that my wife has access to and that sends me quarterly reminders to review everything.

And the personal stuff — the letters to my kids, the notes about family history, the things I want them to know that don't fit in a spreadsheet — those are in a separate, secure space designed for exactly that purpose. I wrote about the process of planning and storing legacy letters in more detail, if that's the part you're stuck on.

Is this system elegant? No. Is it redundant in some places? Yes. But redundancy is a feature when the alternative is your family scrambling to find a document that doesn't seem to exist.

Start with the thing that scares you most

If you've read this far and feel overwhelmed, I get it. The sheer number of options and considerations makes it tempting to close this tab and deal with it later. That's what most people do, and it's why most families end up in the same situation my aunt was in.

So here's my suggestion: don't try to solve the whole problem today. Pick the one category of information that would cause the most chaos if nobody could find it. For most people, that's financial accounts or passwords. For some, it's medical directives. For others, it's the legal documents.

Get that one category organized and accessible to the right person. Use whatever tool makes sense for right now, even if it's a spreadsheet. Then come back and tackle the next category.

The goal isn't a perfect system. The goal is for your family to be able to find what they need without spending weeks digging through drawers and guessing at passwords. Any step in that direction is a good one.

And if you're also thinking about the personal side — the letters, the stories, the things you want to say — don't wait on that either. Those are the records that can't be reconstructed from bank statements and filing cabinets. They only exist if you create them.