Write down what you have online, what you want done with it, and where the keys are kept.
Most people could not list their online accounts from memory. There are the obvious ones — email, banking, a couple of social profiles. Then there is everything underneath. A photo library going back fifteen years. Subscriptions renewing quietly in the background. A forum account from 2011. Cloud storage holding the only copy of something that matters.
None of it closes itself when you die. Someone has to find it all first, and they will be doing that while grieving, usually without the passwords, sometimes without knowing the accounts exist at all.
You can save them that. Not by handing over a list of passwords, which goes stale in months and creates a security problem while you are still alive, but by writing down what exists and what you want done with it.
Work through it in any order, over as many sittings as you like. Your progress saves automatically in this browser. Nothing is uploaded. Close the tab and come back next week — it will still be here.
Start with what you can remember. You will not get it all in one sitting and you don't need to — a partial list is worth far more than no list. Add to it as things occur to you.
Click any name to drop it into the form below. These are the ones people forget.
⚠️ Don't type an actual password into any field on this page. Say where it can be found instead.
Several of the companies holding your most important data will let you nominate someone in advance, from inside your own account settings. You choose the person now. When the time comes, they get access without a court order, a death certificate, or a solicitor's letter.
Almost nobody knows these settings exist. They are buried three menus deep and no one is advertising them.
Do this part first if you do nothing else. A list of accounts is useful. A named legacy contact inside Apple or Google is the difference between someone getting your photographs and someone arguing with a support queue for eight months.
Inactive Account Manager lets you decide what happens to your Google account after a set period of inactivity — three, six, twelve or eighteen months. You can nominate up to ten people to be notified and given a copy of your data, and you can choose to have the account deleted afterwards.
This covers Gmail, Google Photos, Drive, YouTube and Google Pay in one setting. For most people it is the single highest-value item here.
Open Inactive Account ManagerA Legacy Contact can request access to your iCloud data after your death — photos, notes, messages, files, backups. They will need a copy of the death certificate and an access key, which Apple generates when you nominate them.
The access key matters as much as the nomination. Print it and store it with this plan.
A Legacy Contact can look after your memorialised Facebook profile — write a pinned post, respond to friend requests, update your photo. They cannot read your messages. Alternatively you can tell Facebook to delete the account outright when it learns you have died.
Instagram has no equivalent nomination. Family can request memorialisation or removal after the fact, with proof.
Open memorialisation settingsMicrosoft has no advance nomination equivalent to Google's or Apple's. There is nothing to switch on. Next of kin have to apply after the fact, and Microsoft's process is slow.
What you can do instead:
If you use a password manager, its emergency access feature solves most of this problem on its own. You nominate someone, they request access, and if you don't decline within a waiting period you set, they get in.
Set the waiting period to something you'd notice. A few days is enough to decline a request you didn't expect.
The people sorting this out will make dozens of small decisions. Keep the blog or take it down. Print the photos or leave them where they are. Every one of those decisions is easier if you have said something, even briefly.
Answer the ones you have a view on. Leave the rest blank — a blank is honest, and better than a guess made on your behalf.
💡 Wishes recorded here are guidance, not a legal instrument. If something has real financial value — crypto, a domain portfolio, a business — mention it to whoever drafts your will, so the plan and the will agree with each other.
This tool has no password field and never will. A written list of passwords is a security problem while you are alive and a liability for the estate afterwards. It also goes stale — within a year, half of it is wrong, and a plan that is half wrong is worse than no plan, because people trust it.
What lasts is the system. One master password, held somewhere secure, opens everything else. That is what to describe here.
⚠️ Do not type an actual password, PIN, seed phrase or recovery code into these fields. Write where they can be found. "In the safe, in the envelope marked with my name" is a complete answer.
Say it plainly. A clear instruction is far easier to honour than a silence someone has to interpret, and it spares them the decision.
A note on where this ends up. The plan you print at the end says where your keys are. It doesn't contain them. Store it with your will or your other important papers. Don't email it to yourself and don't keep the only copy in the cloud account it describes how to open.
The person who administers your estate and the person best suited to closing forty online accounts are not always the same person. You can name someone specifically for the digital side. Whoever it is, the job is easier if they know it's coming.
💡 What an executor is legally permitted to access varies by state and country, and terms of service often conflict with estate law. Nominating a legacy contact inside the platform itself sidesteps most of that. For anything with real value, take advice from a solicitor in your own jurisdiction.
Print it and store it with your will, or wherever your important papers live. A copy in a fire safe, a copy with your solicitor, a copy with the person named in it — that's plenty.
Come back and update it once a year. Accounts change. So do the people in your life.
⚠️ This plan is stored only in this browser, on this device. Clearing your browsing data will erase it. Print or download a copy — don't rely on it staying here.