Digital legacy planning: leave your family a map, not your passwords
30 July 2026 · Inherit Vault
The instinct is generous: write the passwords down so your family can get in when you're gone. It's also a trap, for them.
Why handing over passwords backfires
Using someone else's login after their death, even a spouse's, even with their written blessing, generally breaches the account provider's terms, and accessing systems without the provider's authorisation can fall foul of the Computer Misuse Act. Banks can refuse bereavement claims and freeze accounts when they see post-death logins. The person you meant to help ends up explaining themselves instead of grieving. And practically: passwords rot. The list you write today is stale in a year, and the account you most needed them to find is the one you added after you wrote it.
What executors are actually entitled to
Everything, through the front door. UK institutions all operate bereavement processes: death certificate in, account details out, funds released to the estate. Executors don't need your passwords; they need to know the account exists and who to contact. Email and social accounts have their own routes: Google's Inactive Account Manager, Apple's Legacy Contact, Facebook's memorialisation. Crypto held on exchanges goes through the exchange's bereavement process like a bank. (Self-custody crypto is the genuine exception, a seed phrase is the asset itself, and it needs the same physical care as cash or gold: a safe, a solicitor, a will.)
The map your family actually needs
One current list: institutions, account references (not credentials), policy numbers, pension providers, the accountant, the solicitor holding the will, the domain registrar, the exchange, what exists and where to knock. Add context passwords can't carry, "the business account pays the cleaner on the 1st", "the life policy is assigned to the mortgage".
Keeping the map alive is the hard part
A paper list goes stale and a spreadsheet named ESTATE.xlsx is a burglar's shopping list. This is the problem Inherit Vault was built for: the map lives encrypted (we cannot read it, no one can), you confirm you're alive on a schedule you choose, and when you're gone your executor unlocks it with the printed Recovery Certificate you left with your will. They get the map. The front doors do the rest.
Leave your family a map, not a mystery.
Inherit Vault is the UK's digital inheritance vault: every account, policy, and instruction your family will need, encrypted so only you can read it, released to your executor when it genuinely matters.
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