There are plenty of good ideas already, I will add mine.
My wife will be devastated when I die and she is not the kind of "business oriented" person. So I rely on my best friend to help her, as well on my children who will then be young adults (even if it happens tomorrow). My friend has access to basically everything I own and he could make terrible things, but I could trust him with my life - I think it is rare to have someone you can completely trust (even though he lives 1200 km away).
I use Bitwarden to keep all my passwords and secure notes. Most of the passwords are in the "family" section so everyone has access no matter if I am alive or not. Since this is a self-hosted system, I need to dump the passwords from time to time and print this out, just in case. I need to do this today :)
My friend above called me one day to say "hey, I cannot get to your bank account". To what I said "WTF dude??". To what he said that he is doing a DRP (Disaster Recovery Plan) test and one of the passwords changed.... So: test your stuff.
I automated a lot of things at home, they usually work 70% of the time :) I realize that there is no way someone can maintain this after my death so I added a "how to dumb down the house" section that describes what can be removed.
I am still investigating the email part. I currently use my own domains and Google Workspace (grandfathered). I think I will be better off switching to fastmail so that what remains of my family can have a single point of contact. I also need to find a way to manage the domains.
Money: my wife is not very good with it so I did a very rough excel sheet to show her how much she can spend to comfortably live her life going on. This is more in the "recomforting" section but this will probably help.
I specifically did not put any nostalgia-inducing elements because this is not the right place for that - she need to be able to read it like a tax report.
One word about the death itself. I am a (fervent :)) atheist and never wondered too much about death but, like everyone, this was not my favorite philosophical topic :) Then I had an operation that required a total anesthesia. This is when I stopped worrying about death - the kind of "switch off" you experience then was eye opening.
What a sad comment, and I truly pity you if you do not have such people around you.
This friend is way worse than me financially and could easily take advantage of the trust but I simply know he won't. Knowing someone for 20 years, in good and bad times, helps to get to know their real side. This is someone I would trust my small children with (and I did), and so would he.
The real solution is to give it to your sworn enemies, who will show up to your widow's door and give her the package with an expression on their face that says "I could have used this against your deceased husband but I didn't because I was always better than him".
> I realize that there is no way someone can maintain this after my death so I added a "how to dumb down the house" section that describes what can be removed.
As someone running a lot of custom automations on Home Assistant, thank you for this tip.
There are plenty of good ideas already, I will add mine.
My wife will be devastated when I die and she is not the kind of "business oriented" person. So I rely on my best friend to help her, as well on my children who will then be young adults (even if it happens tomorrow). My friend has access to basically everything I own and he could make terrible things, but I could trust him with my life - I think it is rare to have someone you can completely trust (even though he lives 1200 km away).
I use Bitwarden to keep all my passwords and secure notes. Most of the passwords are in the "family" section so everyone has access no matter if I am alive or not. Since this is a self-hosted system, I need to dump the passwords from time to time and print this out, just in case. I need to do this today :)
My friend above called me one day to say "hey, I cannot get to your bank account". To what I said "WTF dude??". To what he said that he is doing a DRP (Disaster Recovery Plan) test and one of the passwords changed.... So: test your stuff.
I automated a lot of things at home, they usually work 70% of the time :) I realize that there is no way someone can maintain this after my death so I added a "how to dumb down the house" section that describes what can be removed.
I am still investigating the email part. I currently use my own domains and Google Workspace (grandfathered). I think I will be better off switching to fastmail so that what remains of my family can have a single point of contact. I also need to find a way to manage the domains.
Money: my wife is not very good with it so I did a very rough excel sheet to show her how much she can spend to comfortably live her life going on. This is more in the "recomforting" section but this will probably help.
I specifically did not put any nostalgia-inducing elements because this is not the right place for that - she need to be able to read it like a tax report.
One word about the death itself. I am a (fervent :)) atheist and never wondered too much about death but, like everyone, this was not my favorite philosophical topic :) Then I had an operation that required a total anesthesia. This is when I stopped worrying about death - the kind of "switch off" you experience then was eye opening.