[toomuchtodo]

Everything should be documented. We have a binder with checklists that walk you through gaining access to everything the other partner might need in the event of death (email accounts, domain registrar, bank and brokerage accounts, auto/home/life insurance, ongoing recurring bills of all sorts). Bitwarden databases are exported to paper, 3 hole punched, and put in the binder on a schedule. Both partners get setup with each other's 2FA OTP tokens. Have options? Agreement goes in the binder. Own real estate? Deeds, land trusts, LLC agreements, etc related to this go in the binder. If in doubt, print it out.

Either one of us can assume responsibility for the entire estate in about an hour or so, the only delay would be a life insurance benefit payout. If you have assets that your partner might not know how to facilitate liquidity for, or when to, pay someone you trust to manage that. Your gift to your family is when you leave the world, they can continue on without fumbling to wrap up loose ends.

https://getyourshittogether.org/checklist/

[BerislavLopac]

This is a good approach, but it requires having a partner in the first place...

[kimburgess]

If you don’t have a partner, or one single person in your life who you trust absolutely, you can distribute this trust.

Collate this same information, encrypt it and then use [a key sharing algorithm](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir%27s_Secret_Sharing) to split this encryption key across a set of semi-trusted contacts.

[ljm]

I'm single and living alone, no family in the picture. I have a very small circle of friends I love and who I trust implicitly. With their permission I ask them if it's okay to share some important things with them, in case the worst happens. Spare keys, contacts, etc. etc.

Those friendships might outlive any romantic partnership I do have in future. So I don't think it has to be a partner specifically. Of course, there are still some things that you might not share as openly even with that trust in place, but that doesn't stop you from having a backup plan.

[Hamuko]

Couldn't you have that binder laying around in your home anyways? I imagine my family would be able to gain access to my home if I die (even though not one of them has a key).

[cmg]

I downvoted this at first, but I've undone that and am going to respond.

If you have family, extremely close friends (as adults, life-long friends), these can be options. Consider keeping your 'binder' in a safe deposit box and setting up access via your bank.

If not, an attorney or even CPA may be able to keep this information for you.

[cayleyh]

An alternative is to have your attorney be responsible for executing your will, but keep everything else in the safe deposit box and put the instructions on how to access in the will. That way your attorney can access only if you die and they assume legal authority for exercising your will.

If you don't have anyone you will leave your assets to, the attorney will be the one liquidating your estate as per your will.

[fomine3]

Anyway does it needed unless partner or something exists?

[KineticLensman]

If you have any 'estate' and any relatives, it is advisable to have a will to avoid painful / slow legal processes for those remaining.

[alisonkisk]

Sure for my money, but my heirs aren't going to kill each other fighting over my netflix recommendations.

[rightbyte]

One might object to having different subscriptions to big corps draining your estate if you want eg. a charity to have it.

[alisonkisk]

That's why you need to cancel the credit card when you die.

[mc32]

Not to spoil good ideas or be a negative Nancy...

What is the process for revoking this access in the event of a less than amicable split between partners?

[avereveard]

well it's a checklist to change ownership to a list of deeds, would work exactly the same way, with the except being that's it's a third party whom distributes property ownership among the partners and not a unilateral transfer from both to one.

[legerdemain]

In an accident or disaster (house fire, flooding, earthquake, you name it), this binder will be gone. This binder should be in a secret manager.

[toomuchtodo]

Keep a copy in there if you want for convenience, I argue you’ll still want a paper backup somewhere. Opsec is hard, people are fallible.

“What was the password?”, “Where’s the Yubikey?”, etc. These are not the failure scenarios you want to encounter during a tragedy (speaking from experience).

[pkage]

Bank safety deposit box is probably a good option for backup, it's very unlikely that both your home and the bank will burn down at the same time.

[kbelder]

My house, several of my friends' houses, my insurance agent's office, my vet, all burned down in the same wildfire a few months ago. Local banks were destroyed along with everything stored in them, and we nearly lost our kids' school. Standing at the remains of my house, looking around at the destroyed community, it looks like we were firebombed. Not modern precision strikes... WWII scale, wrath of god, miles of destruction firebombed.

Anyway, I'm just saying that things you think are safe, really aren't. It's inconceivable that two houses across town from each other would burn down on the same day, until they do. Probably not going to happen, but sometimes it does.

Thankfully, my wife grabbed the binder with accounts and passwords, along with the kids and pets, when she evacuated, while I was stuck on a backed-up freeway an hour away.

I've been very conscientious since then about keeping both a physical and digital copy of everything important. I would never trust digital alone, but a physical copy just isn't reliable enough.

[imtringued]

What if you keep a digital backup in your car? The mobility of your car should spread the risk. If your house burns down during work hours your data will be safe.

[NikolaeVarius]

Safety Deposit boxes are not trustworthy

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/business/safe-deposit-box...

[Dylan16807]

A pile of papers will probably survive a lot better than a valuable object, at least.

[teej]

The bank across the street from me is 100% burning up in the same fire as my apartment if the California wildfires get to me.

[teruakohatu]

Fires are strange beasts. Sometimes one house in a street will survive completely unscathed and the rest all burn down to nothing.

A street is a firebreak. An earthquake might level you and them but a fire won't necessarily.

[toomuchtodo]

A lot of banks have been phasing this product out, but if your bank supports it, I highly recommend it. Usually, they’ll even allow you access with a drilling fee if you’ve lost the key but can show multiple forms of ID. Whether this is good or bad depends on your threat model.

[legerdemain]

What's a good, safe place to store the key?

[toomuchtodo]

Either on your keyring or in your fire safe. As I mentioned, if you lose it, you can get the lock drilled at the bank with sufficient ID. All trust waterfalls to meatspace trust providers, just like if you lose your Yubikey AWS support will reset your hardware 2FA with sufficient evidence you are you.

[fiddlerwoaroof]

Safety deposit box at a different bank

[danboarder]

I think giving a USB key or login details with access info to your password manager to a trusted friend or family member might be preferable to having a paper binder that could be lost in a disaster situation.

[epse]

You'd have to account for bit rot though

[jannes]

I recently looked at an old USB key that had some JPGs stored from ~5 years ago.

I was astonished to see that over 50% of the photos had some sort of bit rot that broke the JPG rendering. Many photos would display correctly at the top until the row where the damage occurs and then display grey for the remainder.

This definitely occurs more than you would think on USB keys.

[solstice]

You could generate parity files to guard against this. There was some discussion recently here about tools to do it. One example that is decent is https://github.com/brenthuisman/par2deep

[avereveard]

even for personal safety you need layers of backups. my phone recently lost all data after it botched it's own update, and restoring some key has been a true pain. I've a binder with almost all of the important authenticator tokens or relative recovery codes, but some bank application do the otp setup on their own app side channel and required a lot of paperwork and calls to get it fixed.

[spiffytech]

Home safes are available that are fireproof, waterproof, and very durable. Theft is an issue, though.

A bank safety deposit box is a good backup plan for the home binder.

The benefit of the binder over (or in addition to) the secret manager is it maximizes the chances your family can successfully access your data. I've designated family members as the emergency access contacts for my password manager, but one member completely forgot I even used a password manager, or what it was called. They would never have looked for my data there in an emergency.

[lbeltrame]

Interesting. Did anyone make a similar checklist for passwords and what not? I have something in a binder which is meant to be used in case of emergency, but it's a bit out of date and I wanted to revamp it.

[shortandsweet]

Absolutely read that same book. One of the most useful I've read.