Cheat sheet for if I'm gone

What to do if you are gone or brain dead?

Besides the cheat sheet, My solution is to save logins and other info in a KeepPass file and this iOS client, and guarded by a long password. I share the file with my spouse through iCloud drive. The Bitwarden solution sound good to me too.

Some takeaways and more reasoning behind follows:

You should take the advices as a grain of salt and do your own research. Some of the advices are only applied depending on your countries, of course.

Here are some reasons behind the cheatsheet:

It could also youself who might need such an ‘cheat sheet’: My dad suffers from an previously undiagnosed heart problem which escalated pretty badly last year, with a multi month long stay in hospital, coma etc.. He is now back and well, but time in a coma can do bad fuckery to your brain, in part to ones memory… He simply lost some significant parts and now he is pretty good occupied untangling the ‘insane security fuckup’ (his words) he had constructed around his passwords, bank accounts and investment schemes…

My dad unexpectedly passed away recently, and there were a lot of problems because we didn’t even know his phone unlock PIN (to be fair, he did told us several time, just that none of us bothered to remember). But one of the main problems is that tons of research fund is tied up in my dad account, so it’s basically frozen until we can execute his will.

My mom manage my dad tax return so at least we think we know where all his money and debts are.

This event prompted most of my dad co-worker to create something like this cheat-sheet.

I know there are some couples who just don’t think of this kind of stuff, at all, until it’s too late.

Mostly I’ve heard of it through a sudden death - the other person now has to figure out what and how all the things are paid for and handled.

I know of another where one partner got ownership of a small business after a divorce, but had no idea how to handle personal or business taxes/paperwork/etc. Had never done much more than sign their name under tax records, or whatever - and suddenly had to figure out all of that on their own.

When you lose someone, a very many things have to happen almost immediately. It can be quite overwhelming. Especially given the stress and trauma of just losing a loved one. Having everything “you should already have” in one place makes a lot of sense. And there’s nothing to say that this has to remain only in MD format. A printed copy in the safe would be helpful.

This is the paradox. You want trusted parties to have access, only when you are unable to access it yourself, in cases such as your death, or Alzheimer.

But you don’t want trusted parties to be able to access this in case you are incapable due to being arrested, or choosing to simply elope.

Check out Get Your Shit Together 0. It was started by a woman who lost her husband in an accident, suddenly becoming a widow and single mom to two young children.

She has abridged 1 and long checklists 2 that everyone should complete. Most of us probably don’t even think about these things:

  • will

  • power of attorney (in varying forms)

  • what happens to pets

  • what happens to kids

  • money

  • burial/funeral wishes

  • insurance

  • living will

  • etc.

Any competent estate attorney will do this for you.

    They don't do it for you. They run the paperwork when you do it. You have to make all the important decisions.

    You can use Nolo or Rocket for most of it (and you should, at least bforna first draft, because the expensive attorney is doing the same thing, like H&R Block or an accountant for taxes). Try to save their time for complex stuff; they will be happy to charge $hundreds/hr for data entry eqivalent of running TurboTax. 

    Indeed. It's not cheap, but it's mostly a one-time cost* and the big binder we have that covers all sorts of scenarios and contingencies offers us considerable peace of mind. If you have enough assets that anyone would bother fighting over them**, it's worth doing.

    * Not including divorces or if you change how you want to do things.

    ** If you haven't been involved in settling an estate, that bar is probably far lower than you'd expect.

Also consider what happens if someone is incapacitated but not dead. Getting into email, bank, etc. is one thing, but what if you own property with someone who is suddenly and irreversibly brain damaged? I strongly recommend filing a lasting power of attorney in advance if your risk of this is non-negligible. My mother is living a nightmare due to it right now as she assumed being someone’s spouse would let you take responsibility for an incapacitated spouse.. wrong!

My father had a stroke so debilitating that he lost language entirely, lives in a brain care unit 24/7, and has zero chance of regaining even the most basic idea of a life. But by not being biologically “dead” he retains a lot of legal protections that don’t really suit his situation and my mother is unable to sell her home without the permission of the Court of Protection. We filed for said permission 14 months ago.. and, you can guess the rest. With a lasting power of attorney, she’d have been able to organise her life properly within weeks.

One of the terms I've seen in the US is "Joint Tenants With Right of Survivorship (JTWROS)" but check the details.

It's much rarer now because checks are basically gone, but you used to be able to get accounts that would require both signatures on the check, not just one. 

In a probate situation, your loved ones don't have to know all your passwords and so on. They do need to know where your assets are so they can contact the right organisations to claim them. And you can make that process easier for them by avoiding having small accounts all over the place. 

    I won't go into details but I'm dealing with a somewhat similar situation. If you love your family and want them to make decisions for you when you're incapacitated instead of strangers who will likely be trying to take advantage of the situation, GET AN ESTATE ATTORNEY. One at a large and respected firm with a solid track record. You will be making a minuscule investment compared to the cost of things going sideways. So much trouble for you and your family will be saved during an already difficult time.

Do wills work for medical emergencies too? Because I would assume you could setup an emergency power of attorney for such a scenario. It is ridiculous that you cannot sell your home if your spouse is incapable of consenting.

I can only speak for the UK, but here, there are two types of power of attorney: the health one designates someone to make decisions about medical treatment if the subject is unable to; the finance one allows the attorney to manage the assets of the subject when needed.

The key point is that the whole process should be far easier if these things are setup in advance, while the person is still able to make their wishes clear, i.e. while they can still say who they trust to make decisions for them. 

I imagine it varies by jurisdiction. Here in the UK you can create something called a "living will" but it's mostly about how you want to be treated in terms of your health (think DNR type stuff) and living arrangements and isn't legally enforceable on its own like a regular will – certainly not for something like selling jointly owned property: https://www.ageuk.org.uk/information-advice/money-legal/legal-issues/advance-decisions/

I imagine if we ever get around to accepting euthanasia as a society the idea around a living will need to become formalised. For decades my dad was very clear he would prefer to be dead than exist in the state he is now but sadly the law insists he, or whatever is left of him, must suffer. 

Not a lawyer, but in the US there are typically separate power of attorney documents for financial vs medical decisions. If you search for your state and medical or financial power of attorney you should find standard forms for them and see what they cover.

My mother, who is now in memory care due to Alzheimer's, knew long ago what was in store for her (her mother and one of her sisters also had it) and planned accordingly long ago. She has a simple but comprehensive will...and most importantly at the moment, two powers of attorney that give the designee (me, in this case) control over both her medical/daily living decisions and her financial decisions. The weeks surrounding the day the doctor activated her power of attorney were hectic, but far easier than they would have been without her prior planning.

She'd also made my sister and I co-owners on her bank account, so we had no difficulty accessing money for her care in the short term.

I am lucky to have offspring and friends who know how to drive a keystore so my version of this starts with: “ask one of to unlock the device, or if need be use the backup keystore in technology and here is the passphrase”

And then the rest is the set of URLs which point to the various things, having a key/URL in the keystore, which own the DNS, the VM, the mailboxes, the bank accounts, you-name-it

the keystore also has QR codes to restore the 2FA. It has the unlock for the devices which are live on the 2FA codes, but can recover most of them. The exception is a single bank token which seems to use the secure region on my phone to bootstrap its one-time state, and so you have to re-initialize through the bank.

Since the only account of merit is a joint account, either I’m survived by the person who has access anyway, or we’re both gone and legally the account is frozen.

What it also says is “FOR GOODNESS SAKE DO NOT TELL I AM GONE” because they will lock things up: Better to gain access, learn what you need torrid or not, and then let them do it.

Keeping your money in the bank means the executor of your will can usually get it through a straightforward process.

Keeping your money in crypto means that, by default, it dies with you, unless you take special effort to ensure otherwise, and are willing to trust a solution you can’t possibly debug because you’ll be dead.

Good words on Bitwarden.

I’m banking on the emergency access feature [1] of Bitwarden (available in self-hosted version too [2]).

The “how it works” section has more information [3] but it essentially boils down to trusted individuals requesting access - which can be manually approved by account holder or they are automatically granted access after a pre-defined wait time.

Bitwarden (paid version) also claims this - “If your premium features are cancelled or lapses due to failed payment method, your trusted emergency contacts will still be able to request and obtain access to your Vault. You will, however, not be able to add new or edit existing trusted emergency contacts.”

[1] - https://bitwarden.com/help/emergency-access/ [2] - https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden/wiki/ [3] - https://bitwarden.com/help/emergency-access/#how-it-works

Bitwarden premium costs 10$ a year!

    What got me interested is that Bitwarden is open-source and empowers you to self-host, which for me goes a long way for establishing trust. It has a modern interface through desktop, browser extensions and CLI. You can choose to cloud-host your vault on bitwarden servers, for convenience, with a very generous free tier. Which is what i've been doing for years now, no complaints really. 

If you have been taking exports as backup, be aware that any attachments you have were not exported - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31702594

significantly better than lastpass. moved 3 years ago, got the 10 usd premium subscription just to support the project.

BitWarden has an emergency access feature.

https://bitwarden.com/help/emergency-access/

Essentially you grant another BitWarden user as an emergency access user. They can request access, and you have 7 days to decline access. After 7 days it grants them access to your vault.

Just commenting on the fact that 7 days is a really short time. It's not unusual for people to be without access to their email for a week.

BitWarden has also Organizations

https://bitwarden.com/help/about-organizations/

Which are perfect for sharing access to logins like utilities or insurance.

The big problem with this that I don’t have a good answer to… we’ve been told to use a password manager and have it secured with a long passphrase… and now we write down the username/passphrase on a piece of paper or somewhere else easily accessible - how to adequately secure that?

Maybe encrypt the passphrase under an m of n scheme and distribute to family & friends that you can trust to not collaborate unless you are truly incapacitated?

The answer is shamir's secret sharing algorithm.

Give a chunk of your password to N friends who you trust, with instructions to recombine it. 

LastPass has a reasonable solution to this - your trusted person can request access, and you have a configurable amount of time to decline.

Actually LastPass has a solution to this they call Emergency Access. You set up loved ones, heirs, colleagues etc with their own LastPass account, and at any time they can challenge your account. After a given (variable) waiting period, if you do not cancel their challenge, the credentials in your account revert to their account. The credentials are inherited. In the case of your own cheat sheet (I have something similar), you can save the actual cheat sheet as an attachment to a Note saved in LastPass. Every now and then we test it, and it works great.

    Leave it in escrow with a lawyer, along with a copy of your will.

    If you are super cautious, leave an encrypted copy (or half the passwords etc) with one lawyer/escrow, and have a separate lawyer/escrow hold the decryption key/other half of the passwords etc. Along with easy instructions on how to decrypt!

    End of the day, if I die at an old age, my heirs will also be old and possibly not into computers/tech. I prefer a simple approach that requires minimum skill/effort on their part aside from presenting the relevant death certificate/paperwork to the lawyer. 

        Get a Revocable trust too. A will needs to be witnessed by two people. A trust just needs to be notarized, and make sure to fund it.

Some legal problems if you access things like bank accounts without will being executed. Of course, the rules vary by countries.

I wonder about the legal position of recipients of these cheatsheet. In particular, how much trouble can they get into for using the passwords?

Say probate is taking a long time, so someone logs into the bank account and withdraws money for everyday essentials. That’s probably one reason the deceased person left the cheatsheet. But what happens when a bank notices money being withdrawn from the bank account of a dead person? Presumably it gets flagged as fraud. And if the estate is still going through probate, the person withdrawing money might not have a legal right to do that.

This, a million times. Tech nerds love cooking up elaborate technical solutions to this problem (I’ve seen it here in several threads over the years) but completely ignore the legal requirements and expectations around establishing next of kin and executing probate.

My recommendation always remains the same: don’t over complicate it and work with the existing societal processes. Society deals with people dying all the time. All major companies, industries, etc. have means for dealing this which have established legal precedent and won’t get anyone in the shit by following them. Let those processes unfold and instead focus on providing your loved ones with the means of having what they need to do so. 

    Yes, even if the recipient thinks they will eventually have the legal right of access, until they do it's not legal to try and move funds.

    For a couple, this is one reason to think carefully about which assets are in joint names and which are separate. Ideally, they should have enough money in joint, liquid accounts to cover however long it may take to be granted probate.

I would be surprised if you were legally allowed to go and modify assets before the will is executed.

I know when my partner died that I was not supposed to log in to her accounts and just transfer shit around; banks instead have very well defined processes for working out who is the legally correct person to do that and then empowering them to do so.

Remember, banks and other big companies deal with this all the time. They necessarily must have robust processes for doing it with the existing societal/legal systems of establishing who is the ‘right person’.

I’ve got one of these in 1Password that is shared with my wife. It’s a great idea.

There’s no ultimate solution. The closest that I have, and it is far from perfect, is that I have a family subscription to 1Password, and a very private shared vault, that my wife has access to, containing the most important stuff. She has a PDF and printed emergency access sheet for the 1Password account.

One weird problem I learned of is that you shouldn’t store your will in your safety deposit box, because it will be tied up in legal wrangling when it is needed the most.

Also safety deposit boxes tend to disappear as a service all too frequently, without adequate warning. Make sure if you do get one to visit it often.

    You can usually start the work with a copy of the will, which you don't need to keep in the safe deposit box.

Unfortunately safe deposit boxes aren’t available everywhere - newly built banks often don’t have them, and some banks that have them no longer accept new customers. –They’re expensive to build and maintain, and they’re seen as being in a somewhat grey area with regards to KYC laws.

Having a safe at home is an option, but it needs to be mounted properly to prevent a burglar from being able to simply carry it out and try and access later.

At the end of the day, your best bet is to keep instructions on accessing your data (minus the actual code that is needed) somewhere it can easily be found by your family, and make sure that one or more family members have copies of the code but don’t know the full details of where to use it without those instructions.

I live an internationally nomadic lifestyle. Most of the info in this doc doesn’t apply to my life. I also have no dependents, so if I die, it’s up to the corporations to deal with the loose ends I leave. I don’t really have a reason to leave them a cheat sheet.

However, recently I’ve heard some horror stories from friends about losing access to their phones or being detained in immigration or other places with little access to the outside world. So I’ve created a document with important information in the case of emergencies that I’ve shared with trusted contacts. It includes how to access copies of my identity documents, contacts of key people in my life, my last known address, upcoming travel plans, contact information for my clients. I’m considering automating some parts of it, but for now it’s basically just a text document in a cloud drive.

The important thing is that it be easily accessible…printed for example. No, you don’t want all your passwords on a piece of paper. But pointers to where the passwords are, how someone can get emergency access to them, as well as locations of other accounts, documents, etc. is what’s important.

Also consider setting a successor on GitHub:

We recommend inviting another GitHub user to be your successor, to manage your user owned repositories if you cannot

https://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/setting-up-and-managing-your-personal-account-on-github/managing-access-to-your-personal-repositories/maintaining-ownership-continuity-of-your-personal-accounts-repositories

The successor has only access to the public repositories after presenting a death certificate.