Guide

What happens to your accounts when you die

A house has a deed and a procedure. An online account has a terms-of-service page and a support queue. The people who loved you do not inherit your password. In many places they do not inherit the right to open the inbox and "just take a look," even when that would make the funeral easier. Fiduciary-access rules, where they exist, still run through the provider and through whoever the law recognises as executor or heir. They do not run through an app that happens to know the email address.

The first month is a search problem

The practical crisis is discovery. Direct debits keep leaving. A life policy sits with a broker nobody mentioned. A brokerage account sends mail to an address that is not the house. Email, if someone can legally reach it, is often the index of all of this, which is why closing it on day one is a common and expensive mistake. The useful artefact is a list: provider, purpose, and the human who already has a relationship with that provider.

Each kind of account has its own door

Banks and brokers will ask for a death certificate and proof of authority. They will not accept a screenshot from a family vault as a withdrawal instruction. Insurers pay the beneficiary on the form, which may be an ex-partner from a decade ago. Employers and pension administrators have their own packets. Subscription companies mostly want a card to be stopped. Domain names and company registries expire on a calendar that does not pause for grief.

Crypto is the sharp edge of the same idea. If nobody has the keys, the coins are not "in the estate" in any operational sense, even if a will mentions them. If everybody has the keys, they are not safe while you are alive. The honest instruction is where the keys are stored and who is allowed to use them, written so a non-technical person can follow it with a lawyer, not a seed phrase pasted into a note.

What a vault can hand over

A release packet can say "the policy is with Example Mutual, the broker is A. Martin, the folder is in the study." It can say "do not use the savings account to pay the funeral; there is a separate current account for that." It cannot log in, reset a password, or tell the bank to ignore its own process. Treating it as a backdoor is how families get locked out, or worse, how someone commits fraud with a dead relative's credentials.

Large platforms already have a narrow version of this

Apple, Google and similar companies offer legacy contacts or inactive-account tools for their own services. Those tools are real and worth switching on. They do not know about the credit union, the notary, or the insurance rider. A cross-provider map still has a job, precisely because the platforms will not do it for each other.

If you are the person who will have to do this for someone else, ask for the map while they can still correct it. If you are the person who should leave one, the smallest useful version is a single page with ten institutions and a phone number for the lawyer. Perfection is how these projects stall.

This article is general information, not advice about your estate or your country's probate rules.