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> Things that really matter (banks, etc.) have well-established next-of-kin processes.

I would say that the exception might be for local/non-cloud things - for instance your phone, laptop, NAS, etc.

If you are the controller/admin of data that might be good for others to have (family photos/videos/etc) - then setting up some process for handing passwords over for that to Next of Kin would be good.

As for services, utilities, etc - having literally just been through this in the past few weeks, it's incredibly frustrating that so many businesses don't have well established and functional processes for dealing with accounts owned by the deceased.

The executor reached out to the services that needed to be terminated with sale of the house, and without fail they all screwed up in some dumb way. Most of them keep insisting on only being able to talk to the deceased person, even when you're the executor of the estate. (And they don't understand that, either).

We ended up having to send registered tracked letters to their formal mailing addresses for several because of how insistent they were on sticking to their "only the account holder can make changes" script. Despite them having copies of the death certificate, extracts from the will, etc.




You should share shared content with them now, not after you die.


They may already have access to it, or some subset of it. You might not share all of it for various reasons, including not wanting to just dump years of photos on them that they have no interest in.

That access might go away though and they might need information about how certain bits of that information are stored, and what they need to do in order to preserve it.




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