It’s not a fun question, but it deserves an honest answer — and the honest answer is: mostly, nothing happens. Your accounts don’t close themselves. Subscriptions keep billing. Photos sit in a cloud nobody can open. Email keeps piling up. And the people you love are left guessing at passwords at the worst possible moment to be solving puzzles.
The average person now has more than a hundred online accounts. Very few of us have told anyone what they are, let alone how to reach them. This guide walks through what actually happens to your accounts — and a short, concrete plan that makes all of it easier for the people you’d leave behind. None of it requires any particular app. It’s simply what a prepared digital life looks like.
The default: accounts drift, and families guess
There is no master switch. When someone dies, each company finds out separately — usually only if a family member tells them, with paperwork — and until then, everything keeps running on autopilot:
Subscriptions keep charging
Streaming, storage, memberships, software — billed to the card on file until someone cancels. Executors find them on statements months later.
Email keeps receiving
Bank statements, bills, renewal notices, password resets — piling up in an inbox nobody can open.
Photos stay locked away
Providers can't simply hand them over on request — privacy rules protect the account even after death.
Then, deletion
Some platforms close inactive accounts on a timer — Google may delete after roughly two years of inactivity, photos included.
A family without access is left with the formal route: death certificates, notarized requests, sometimes court orders — a months-long process with no guarantee, because in many cases the law genuinely doesn't allow the company to open the account. The difference between that and a calm handover is entirely in the preparation.
Your email is the master key
If you plan for only one account, make it your email. Nearly every other account resets its password through it — whoever can open your inbox can, with patience, reach almost everything else. Your phone number is the second key, since so many verification codes go there.
That’s worth letting sink in: the practical fate of your entire digital life mostly comes down to whether the right person can reach one inbox and one phone number — and whether the wrong people can’t.
Use the legacy tools the big platforms already offer
A few major platforms have quietly built exactly the right thing, and almost nobody switches it on:
Google
Inactive Account Manager
Choose trusted contacts and exactly what they receive — Gmail, Photos, Drive — after your account goes quiet for a period you set.
Apple
Legacy Contact
A designated person can request access to your iCloud data — photos included — with an access key and a death certificate.
Facebook & Instagram
Memorialization
A legacy contact can manage a memorialized profile — or you can choose to have the account deleted instead.
Each takes about five minutes. They're genuinely good — and genuinely incomplete: they're one-platform-at-a-time, and most services (including nearly every bank) offer nothing self-serve at all. For everything else, what your family needs most is simpler: knowing the account exists.
Can’t they just use my passwords?
Here’s the uncomfortable legal reality, in plain terms: logging into someone else’s account — even a late spouse’s — generally violates the platform’s terms of service, and in many places it technically runs afoul of computer-access and privacy laws. In the US, most states have adopted a law (RUFADAA) that lets your executor access digital assets if you authorized it — through a platform’s own tool or in your will or estate documents. Details vary by country; this isn’t legal advice.
The practical takeaway is belt-and-suspenders: switch on the platform tools, name digital access explicitly in your estate documents, and leave organized, secure access so nobody has to improvise.
The 15-minute plan
You don’t need to catalogue your whole digital life. You need five things, and the first pass takes about fifteen minutes.
1
List what matters. Email and phone plan first, then banking and investments, photo storage, bills and subscriptions, and anything unusual — a domain name, crypto. Don't chase completeness: the top ten accounts cover most of what your family would need.
2
Switch on the built-in legacy tools. Google, Apple, Facebook — five minutes each, while you're thinking about it.
3
Choose your person. A spouse, an adult child, an executor. Decide what they'd need first: the email, the phone, the bank list.
4
Leave access the safe way. Not a sticky note, not a spreadsheet, not a note in email — those are exactly as available to a burglar or a breach as they are to your family. The safe shape is an encrypted vault with trusted emergency access: one place that holds the list and the logins, built so that even the company storing it can't read what's inside, and able to grant your chosen person access when it's actually needed.
5
Tell them, and revisit yearly. A plan nobody knows about isn't a plan. Say where things are and how it works, then put a once-a-year reminder on the calendar to keep the list current.
Do these five things and you’ve spared your family the guessing, the support tickets, and the quiet loss of things that mattered — the photos, the letters, the records of a life.
How ready is your family today?
Ten questions, about two minutes — see your readiness score and exactly where the gaps are.
We built Simply Once around exactly this problem. It's one encrypted place for the accounts, documents, and details that make up your life — organized once, kept current, and shared only with the people you choose. Trusted emergency access means the right person gets exactly what they need, when it matters, and zero-knowledge encryption means nobody else — including us — can ever read what's inside.
If you never use Simply Once, do the five steps anyway; they're what count. If you'd like one calm place to do them in, that's what we're for.
