Ask HN: How do you manage your digital legacy for after you die?

I am going to say the opposite. There are two classes of digital information for me.

1. What my wife cares about: mostly financial. My wife is a joint account holder on everything she can be. Thats everything but retirement accounts. She is the beneficiary on those. I send her statements for those every year and we have a shared spreadsheet.

On the other hand, I think people overestimate how much people will care about your pictures. It’s like no one wants to see your vacation photos. For the ones that she does care about, we just share them.

Wow, that contains a fatal weakness (no pun intended), that She won't assume the email is spam (or a scam) and just delete it without opening it.

It's quite possible for you (or anyone who uses your work) to have the outcome they were trying to prevent because of this.

This is a good point, especially with a lot of 2FA being tied to phone numbers.

My dad set me up as his legacy contact for his Apple account, and he uses their Passwords app. But I’ll need to remember to keep his phone (and the bill paid) until I can be sure the 2FA won’t be needed for something.

While I’m sure presenting a death certificate to a bank would be enough to trigger processes that won’t need it, I’m betting having that access would make many things easier.

Interesting, but every single day? That’s nuts. What if, for some reason, you didn't have internet access for a few days?

Password manager is the right first step. A few others worth adding:

  - A "death folder" document (encrypted, in the password manager) listing every
    account, what's in it, and what to do with it. Google/Apple both have inactive
    account managers built in — most people don't know they exist.

  - For photos: make sure at least one copy lives somewhere your wife already has
    independent access to, not just through your credentials.

  - For things that matter: write it down in plain language. Not just passwords —
    context. Why you kept something, what it means.

  On the AI side: I've been thinking about this in the context of agent memory
  persistence (building Cathedral — a memory layer for AI agents). The same problem
  exists: identity and context that only lives in one place, not transferable.
  Structured memory exports are something we're working toward for exactly this reason.