Section 2: The Legacy Drawer

Another suggestion I strongly recommend is to establish a legacy drawer with all the key information the surviving spouse or family member would need to know, including key digital data. This moves beyond the digital realm that is the main focus of this report, but the concept is very useful as a construct to collect and preserve key information, including digital legacy items.

From a digital legal perspective, the most critical item to include would be key passwords and account details. If there were any one thing that would make things easier after a loved one’s death, it would be having access to the deceased’s key computer and online account passwords. It will unlock the keys to the kingdom and open up almost all the information needed to figure out everything else.

I first learned about this idea from financial advisor and author Dave Ramsey. I need to give him full credit for this idea, and I heartily support and embrace it. For the scope of this report, we will focus on the digital aspects. (For more information from the original source, go to http://bit.ly/2pT57Ty.)

A legacy drawer is a well-known location used to store all the vital documents and information that a spouse would need to know in the event of a sudden death. Of course, this is also highly sensitive information that you want to protect, but be careful how you protect it. If you place this in a safety deposit box, and only one person has access to this box, it does not help the spouse who might need to access it. So be sure to balance the need for access by trusted family members with the security of this data. Most families have none of this sort of paperwork in a centralized location, and only through heartbreaking searching through the vast amount of paperwork around a house will most surviving spouses be able to locate it.

Here’s what is recommended to be in your legacy drawer:

• Cover letter with list of contents and instructions

• Wills (You do have a will, don’t you? You need one!)

• Estate plans

• Powers of attorney

• List of all financial accounts, including type, institution, and account numbers

  Be sure to include the following: cash, bank accounts, stocks, bonds, mutual funds, money market funds, retirement and pension plans, IRAs, annuities, and life insurance.

• Funeral instructions

• All insurance policies, such as health, car, disability, term life, home owners, and so on. Be sure to include account numbers and contact numbers for the insurer

• Important documents such as birth certificates, deeds, car titles, social security cards, and other key financial documents

• Monthly budget of how the household operates financially

• Tax returns (usually for the previous seven years)

• Key passwords and online access information, which we will cover in more detail shortly

• Contact information for CPAs, lawyers, and other professional advisors.

I recommend that you review and update the digital legacy drawer at least once a year, and after major financial or life changes. Additionally, I recommend going through the legacy drawer and its contents with a trusted family member at least once per year.

Although I mentioned this earlier, I want to emphasize how critical it is to have both spouses on all the key financial accounts, including mortgage, deeds, banking, and investment accounts, and ensuring that both spouses know how to access these accounts.

Section 3: Passwords

Storing key passwords in the legacy drawer will help dramatically in managing after an unexpected death, but it is a complex enough topic that we will spend some focused time with it.

To be clear, we all have a right to privacy, and the deceased has every right to decide what data to share. However, there are plenty of items that a spouse should and would need access to after a sudden death. Planning ahead on how you’d want your designated trusted person to have access to your key passwords saves a lot of stress and frustration in an emergency.

As complex as this issue can be, fortunately we have many ways to help manage this today with current technology. One of the best ways to manage this is with an online password manager such as 1Password, LastPass, or any of the other quality password managers currently on the market. These will integrate with almost all of your gear, from phones, tablets, to browser plug-ins on all the major web browsers.

Password managers can help in a number of ways, beyond just organizing access in the event of an emergency. On a day-to-day level, they can even generate strong, unique passwords for the various accounts supervised by the password manager. This avoids one of the most common dangerous practices people use online, which is to reuse the same password on multiple accounts. Account breaches and password gathering phishing schemes are abundant today, so limiting the damage to a single account can be extremely helpful.

More relevant to our discussion of managing a digital legacy, password managers also offer an easy and planned way to access key accounts in the event of an emergency. And these services are beginning to build in features specifically for this use case. LastPass, for instance, recently introduced an emergency access functionality. This makes it possible for the user to designate a trusted family member or friend to request access to the LastPass account and retrieve passwords. The user decides how much time must elapse before access is granted after being requested, and during the time, the user will be notified of the request and given the opportunity to decline the access request.

After it is enabled, the user also can designate which passwords would be shared, facilitating granular control over spouse access. This makes a lot of sense, and solves a number of technical problems encountered during a sudden death.

Other password managers might offer similar functionality, but even if they don’t, it’s easy to create a similar version. When a password manager is used, it’s typically protected by a single master password. A great option is to add a form to your digital legacy drawer with your password manager information, such as the following:

• Password manager vendor

• Account name

• Master password

• Simple instructions for a nontechnical person on how to access the password manager

• Pins/passcodes for any phones or tablets

If you chose not to use a password manager, you can still use the idea of a written form with key passwords added to your digital legacy drawer, but keep in mind that this will need to be updated often and will quickly age out of accuracy as passwords are updated.

Another good option is to consider storing key information on an encrypted USB drive such as an Ironkey. A few cautions, though: because this is digital data, it can become corrupted over time. Moreover, accessing this can be more complicated for nontechnical family members. It’s best to check the data integrity often and ensure that your trusted next-of-kin knows how to work with it.

We are seeing more biometrics in use as passwords, but this can be a big challenge if your next-of-kin is trying to access something protected by a biometric login. Be careful with where and how you enable biometrics if you want to ensure that a spouse or loved ones can access a device after you are gone. Most devices offer a nonbiometric backup access method, so that can be an option. The key is to think through the options and ensure that you aren’t blocking a trusted family member if you don’t intend to.

Section 4: Home IT

A complicated home IT networking environment might make intuitive sense to those of us who work daily in the IT world, but it can be a bewildering, confusing, and frustrating experience for our spouses to deal with if they are less technically inclined. There are things we can do to help minimize the complexity though.

First, keep the critical IT gear of the home network environment simple and straightforward. Make it easy enough for those with minimal technical knowledge to be able to troubleshoot and understand. Additionally, if the less-technical spouse needs to lean on a neighbor or family friend who might be more technical, the less complicated the home IT network is, the easier the friend can figure it out and resolve any problems.

It helps to label the various pieces of home IT gear with easy to understand names, such as “Switch,” “Cable Modem,” or “Wireless Router.” This makes it easier for nontechnical loved ones to find and understand the network. It also helps greatly if you make a simple network map of your home network environment, and store it in an easily accessible place. As with other accounts, it’s helpful if both spouses can access key IT gear such as wireless access points and network routers.

For shared digital memories such as pictures, videos, and similar important family memories, it’s helpful to store these in a shared archive that multiple family members can access. Hunting for important pictures shouldn’t be a worry in the time of grief and crisis.

So much of our home IT is now moving online to the cloud, so once again, ensuring that all the key household members have the correct passwords goes a long way to helping with this issue.

Even on the most basic level, adding a new tablet or phone to the home wireless network can be a challenge if a surviving spouse is not aware of how the home IT system was set up, or has no knowledge of basic items such as the WiFi passwords. It’s very helpful if both spouses are at least moderately aware of how the home network is constructed, and the basics such as WiFi passwords, administrative passwords to key networking gear, such as internet routers, and WiFi access points.

A much better plan is to make the home IT network as simple, basic, and intuitive as possible, such that a less-technical member of the household can repair it. Having an overly complex home IT environment might be fun and rewarding for hardcore IT nerds like a lot of us, but it can be maddeningly frustrating to our spouses who “just want it to work.” Whether this need to understand the home network comes up when the IT-clueful spouse is on a business trip and something breaks, or in the event of an unexpected death, the remaining spouse doesn’t need to struggle with an incredibly complex setup just to access the internet on an iPad.

Recommendations/Lessons Learned:

Keep the basic household network simple. It shouldn’t take a network engineer to figure out how to get an iPhone on the home WiFi network or troubleshoot the cable modem connection.

Section 5: Smartphones

As a society, we’ve become incredibly reliant on smartphones. The new capabilities of these powerful computers in our pockets offer amazing productivity enhancements, wonderful opportunities to ignore our friends during dinner, and interesting ways to change our personal knowledge management. They have become integral to our life, and, as such, have a great deal of important information that a spouse might need to access after a sudden death. Without proper planning, this information can be lost forever.

For instance, how often do you memorize important phone numbers these days? Having grown up in the ’70s and ’80s, we had no choice but to memorize key phone numbers and contact information. Now, though, we just look them up in our phones. This is great, unless that phone is lost or destroyed, or the ability to unlock the phone is lost.

In the event of something like a car accident, phones, laptops, tablets, and similar electronics may often be damaged or destroyed. If we are traveling and left alone, injured, without any access to our phone’s contact list, this can make it very difficult to reach family or friends.

On the other hand, smartphones have some very handy new features. One of them, from the Apple side of the Smartphone Wars, is the Find Friends feature. When appropriate permission is given, specified people can monitor the location of an iPhone or iPad and be able to track someone down if they are overdue or missing, assuming that the iPhone or iPad is still active and able to send and receive a signal. A similar capability is built in to Android phones powered by a number of third-party apps, or with Google+.

Another recent feature added to modern phones is the concept of an emergency contact that can be viewed without needing to know the passcode or password to a phone. For instance, in an iPhone, you can add an emergency contact in the Health App, and when configured, the emergency contact will be viewable on the locked phone screen. Most Android phones have a very similar feature, found in the My Information section of the settings menu. Finally, there are apps available for purchase that replicate this functionality. This is very helpful in the event of an emergency when a first responder is looking to contact a relative.

Increasingly, smartphones are being used as part of the authentication for online services and password resets. More vendors are offering a second factor via text messages to phones. This is a useful security and privacy feature, but one more area that we need to keep in mind for access to a service in an emergency.

Smartphones have quickly filled the role of the camera for many families. As such, many family memories and important photos are created and stored on smartphones. Security has increased on industry-leading smartphones to the point that it might be near impossible to access these files without a valid passcode. Keeping the idea of emergency access for loved ones in mind when you’re configuring the phones and related services can resolve a lot of heartache after a sudden death.

A number of services offer the ability to automatically back up photos, videos, and other data created on a smartphone to a cloud-based service. This is useful for a number of reasons, including loss or destruction of a phone. Many of these photos might be cherished memories after a sudden death. It is important to consider how a spouse or loved one can access this data if needed.

Smartphones also have become our contact list and phone books. In the event of an emergency, having access to the contacts in a smartphone can be critical to being able to contact friends and family. This is one more bit of important data that can be locked behind an unknown passcode.

Additionally, the rise of biometric authentication technology poses some interesting new challenges. This must be kept in mind if it will be useful or necessary for a loved one to access a smartphone after an unexpected death. In general, this technology requires a passcode to unlock a device in addition to a finger print or other biometric measurement.

All of these issues, which will likely grow more complex as smartphones evolve and become even more integral to our lives, mean that we need to take a long look at how we share the unique and vital information in our smartphones after a sudden death.

Recommendations/Lessons Learned:

• We are very reliant on our smartphones for our contact information, but in an emergency, they might be lost to us. Try to memorize at least one key phone number for use in an emergency.

• When traveling, always let someone know where you are going and when you are expected. If you are overdue, at least someone knows to look for you.

• Consider all the unique and valuable information on your smartphone. Be sure to back it up and make it accessible to a trusted loved one.

• Add an emergency contact that is visible on the lock screen of your phone.

Section 6: Online Digital Services

Some online services are beginning to offer features and functionality to manage the death of a user. Some require that you configure them ahead of time, while others are managed by a next-of-kin after a death. We’ll cover those that require pre-setup here; we look at the others in Chapter 2 of this report.