Picture this: your spouse is sitting at the kitchen table three days after you died. The funeral isn't even planned yet. They need to get into your email to find the life insurance policy number, but your password isn't the one they thought it was. They try the recovery option. The verification code goes to your phone, which is locked with a passcode they don't know. The recovery email is your work account, which IT already deactivated. They call Google. An automated system tells them to fill out a form, upload a death certificate (which they don't have yet), provide a court order (which requires an attorney they haven't hired), and wait four to six weeks.

Three days in. And they're already locked out of everything.

This isn't a worst-case scenario. It's the default. The online accounts you use every day -- email, banking, photos, social media -- were all built to keep unauthorized people out. They do that job well. But when you die, your family becomes an unauthorized person. No major platform has a "someone died, let the family in" button.

Most people assume their spouse or next of kin can just call customer service and explain the situation. The reality is months of paperwork, legal fees, and dead ends, all happening during the worst period of their life.

The default is lockout

Every online account you have is protected by layers of security. Passwords, two-factor authentication, biometric locks, security questions. You set all of this up to keep strangers out. It works.

When you die, though, that same security locks out the people closest to you. Your spouse doesn't have your fingerprint. Your adult child doesn't know your security questions. Your executor has legal authority over your estate, but try explaining that to a chatbot.

What families expect: a phone call and a death certificate. What actually happens: formal legal documentation, identity verification, proof of death, sometimes a court order. Weeks at minimum. Some families spend months fighting for access to a single account.

And the whole time, the subscriptions keep charging. The bills keep arriving. Nobody can reach the photos or the messages that actually matter.

What Google does with your accounts after you die

Google controls more of your digital life than almost any other company. Gmail, Google Drive, Google Photos, Chrome passwords, YouTube, Google Pay, Google Voice. Losing access to a Google account often means losing access to everything at once.

If you set up Inactive Account Manager: Google's Inactive Account Manager lets you choose what happens after a period of inactivity (3, 6, 12, or 18 months). You can designate trusted contacts who receive a notification and access to specific data. You can also choose to have the account deleted entirely. It takes about five minutes to set up. If you do nothing else after reading this article, do this.

If you didn't set it up: Your family submits a request for a deceased user's account. Google requires the requester's government-issued ID, the death certificate, and an email that proves a connection to the deceased. Even then, there's no guarantee they'll grant access. Google reviews each case individually and may only release specific data, not full account access. The process takes weeks to months.

What's at stake: Years of email history. Every Google Drive document. The family photo library. Saved passwords for dozens of other sites. If your family relied on your Google account as the hub of your digital life, losing access here cascades into losing access everywhere.

Apple, Facebook, and everyone else

Apple

Apple introduced Legacy Contact in late 2021 with iOS 15.2. If you set one up, your designated contact can access most of your Apple account data after your death using a special access key combined with your death certificate. The process is relatively smooth -- by the standards of this world, anyway.

If you didn't set up a Legacy Contact, your family needs a court order. Not a death certificate. Not a letter from a lawyer. A court order specifically granting access to the account. Apple's Digital Legacy support page explains the requirements, but the short version is: expect to hire an attorney, file a petition, and wait.

The locked iPhone is its own problem. If nobody knows the passcode, the device itself becomes inaccessible, and with it, all the two-factor authentication codes that were routing through it. That locked phone can block access to every other account your family is trying to reach.

Facebook and Instagram (Meta)

When Facebook learns that someone has died, the account can be memorialized. A "Remembering" badge appears next to the name, and the account is frozen in its current state. If you designated a Legacy Contact, that person can pin a post, update the profile picture, and respond to friend requests. They cannot read messages, log in to the account, or remove existing content.

Families can also request deletion. But what catches people off guard is the emotional dimension. After memorialization, Facebook's algorithms don't stop. Birthday reminders still pop up in friends' feeds. The "On This Day" feature resurfaces old photos and posts. For some people, that's comforting. For others, it's a gut punch every few weeks that they didn't ask for and can't control.

Instagram follows the same memorialization process through Meta's help center.

Banks and financial institutions

Banks freeze accounts when they're notified of a death. Joint accounts may remain partially accessible, but individual accounts are locked until the estate goes through probate or a court appoints an authorized representative. Online-only banks and fintech platforms can be harder to deal with because there's no local branch to visit with paperwork. Everything goes through support tickets and mailed documents.

Streaming services and subscriptions

Streaming accounts are non-transferable. There's no inheritance process for a Netflix or Spotify account. When the credit card on file expires or gets canceled, the account simply lapses. The watch history, playlists, and saved content go with it.

Cryptocurrency

This is the one that terrifies estate attorneys. If you hold crypto in a self-custodied wallet and nobody else has your seed phrase or private key, those funds are permanently gone. There is no recovery process, no company to call, no court order that works. The Bitcoin blockchain doesn't have a customer service line. Exchange-based holdings (Coinbase, Kraken) follow a more traditional process with death certificates and legal documentation, but self-custodied assets live or die with the seed phrase.

The legal side your family doesn't know about

Most states have adopted some version of the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (RUFADAA). It sounds like a mouthful, but the basic idea is that it gives your executor legal authority to manage your digital accounts after you die.

Here's the catch: RUFADAA uses a three-tier priority system. First, it respects whatever you set up directly with the platform (like Google's Inactive Account Manager or Facebook's Legacy Contact). If you didn't use those tools, it looks at your will or trust for instructions about digital assets. If you didn't address digital assets in your estate documents either, state default rules apply -- and those vary.

What this means in practice: your will can say your executor gets access to everything, but if you told Google to delete your account after six months of inactivity, Google's setting wins. Platform settings override your will. Your will overrides state defaults.

The other reality is that most families aren't thinking about RUFADAA while they're grieving. They're not consulting estate attorneys in the first week. They're trying to pay the mortgage and plan a funeral. The legal framework exists, but it's slow, expensive, and assumes a level of preparation that most people haven't done.

The costs nobody talks about

Start with the subscriptions. The average American pays for a dozen or more -- streaming, software, gym memberships, meal kits, app subscriptions. That's $200 to $600 per month auto-charging a credit card or bank account that nobody can access to cancel. Those charges pile up for months. Some families don't catch them until the credit card statements finally arrive.

Then there's the money nobody knows about. Brokerage accounts, HSAs, PayPal balances, old 401(k)s from three jobs ago, crypto wallets. If your family doesn't know these exist, they sit unclaimed. States collect billions in unclaimed property every year. Some of it belongs to people who died without telling anyone where to look.

The legal fees add up fast. Petitioning a court for access to a single digital account can run $1,000 to $3,000 in attorney fees. Need court orders for multiple platforms? Multiply accordingly. That money comes out of the estate, which means less for the people you're trying to protect.

And all of this -- the hours on hold, the forms, the explaining the same situation to yet another customer service rep -- happens during a period when your family has the least capacity to deal with any of it. Every rejection email, every automated response that treats them like a potential hacker, reopens the wound. The bureaucracy doesn't just frustrate. It compounds grief.

What you can do in the next ten minutes

You don't need to overhaul your estate plan today. But you can do three things right now that will keep your family from getting locked out:

1. Turn on Google Inactive Account Manager (3 minutes). Go to myaccount.google.com/inactive, choose a timeout period, add a trusted contact, and decide what happens to your data. Done.

2. Set up Apple Legacy Contact (2 minutes). On your iPhone, go to Settings > Your Name > Sign-In & Security > Legacy Contact. Add someone. They'll get an access key they can use with your death certificate.

3. Tell one person your phone passcode. Right now. Text your spouse, your sibling, your best friend. "Hey, if anything ever happens to me, my phone passcode is ____." That single piece of information unlocks the 2FA codes, the banking apps, and the photos that matter most.

Those three steps take less time than reading this section did. For the full digital end-of-life plan -- account inventory, executor designation, secure storage -- our guide to digital end-of-life planning walks through everything. And when it comes to actually having that conversation with someone you trust, this piece on sharing critical information with loved ones covers how to start without it getting weird.

That person at the kitchen table, the one trying to get into your email while the funeral is still being planned -- they shouldn't have to be there. Not like that. Not locked out, on hold, filling out forms they can barely read through the blur.

Ten minutes of setup and one honest conversation is the difference between your family spending months fighting platforms and your family spending that time doing what they should be doing: remembering you.

When I Die Files gives you a secure, private place to document your accounts, access credentials, and instructions -- so the people you love don't spend the hardest months of their lives fighting for access to your digital life. Start with the accounts that matter most. Store them securely. Tell one person where to look.