07/28/2026
As a Professional Organizer, who assists with this, it is integral that you and/or your family is prepared with the access to these items in the event of one's passing. The following is also one of the reasons I prefer the old fashioned passcodes rather than biometrics.
From another post:
"Most people think a death certificate closes a parent's accounts. In 2011, that was true. In 2026, it closes almost nothing, and nobody who walks into my office in the first week has any idea that the hardest part is still to come.
I have run my father's funeral home since 2011. I have slid the same probate forms across the same desk more times than I can count.
And every time I do, there is a clock running on the adult child sitting in front of me that they cannot see, cannot feel, and nobody tells them about until it is too late.
The clock is not on my wall. It is not on the courthouse. It is not at the bank. It is on a phone sitting in a drawer at their parent's house.
Face ID stops working forty-eight hours after the last time their father used it.
By the time the daughter signs that probate form on Tuesday morning, the phone had been sitting in her father's desk drawer for four days, untouched.
Face ID had died quietly on the Saturday, twenty-six hours after he had. Nobody in the family had noticed. Nobody had thought to go to his study and try the phone.
The only way into the phone now is the six-digit passcode he set up the day he bought it.
If nobody in the family knows that passcode, it will still let her try. Ten times. After ten wrong guesses, some phones wipe themselves to factory. Others lock themselves for good.
Either way, the phone becomes a brick with every account she needs locked inside it.
Apple will not open a phone for a surviving family member. Death certificate, executor letter, power of attorney, none of it matters. I have watched a son spend five months trying to get Apple to release his father's data and eventually give up.
Behind the phone is every code the bank is about to ask her for. Every authenticator app. Every verification text her father's mortgage company is going to insist on before they will even talk to her.
Even if she finds the passcode and gets into the phone on Wednesday morning, the chain does not stop.
She opens the authenticator app. There are eleven accounts inside. Does she know which one the bank uses. Because that is one account out of forty her father had, and she has thirty-nine more behind it.
Does she know which email is the recovery address for the mortgage. Because her father set it to a Hotmail account he opened in 2004 and has not touched in years.
Does she know the answer to the security question on his pension. Because he set it to the name of the first car he owned, and he has never told her the answer to that question in her entire life.
Does she know where the printed backup codes are. Because he generated them in 2022 and wrote them on the back of an envelope he filed somewhere in his office.
Does she even know which of his accounts are gated behind which of those locks. Because he never wrote any of it down, and the only person who could answer any of those questions stopped being able to answer them on Friday.
The phone is not one lock. It is the first lock on every other lock in the house, and every lock behind it has its own key she also does not have.
That is the half of her father's estate that is about to lock down.
Now here is the half nobody, nobody, nobody warns her about.
His Wall Street Journal was going to charge his card on Monday. His SiriusXM renewed Tuesday. His golf club dues Thursday. His Audible, his iCloud, his Amazon Prime, his Costco membership. None of them were on any death notification feed.
None of them got a memo. None of them had any idea he was gone.
They just keep charging.
And they will keep charging the card in his name, which is still live, which is still active, which his bank has not frozen yet, until she personally hunts down the login for every one of them and cancels them one at a time.
Cancelling any of them is not a one-step problem.
First she has to know the subscriptions exist. Most of them were set up by him, on cards she has never seen statements for.
Then she has to know which card each of them is billing. The WSJ is on a card from a local credit union she did not know he still used. The golf club dues come out of a savings account he opened in the nineties. The SiriusXM is on a Visa her father replaced last year and forgot to update.
Then she has to find the login for each one. Every service has its own username. Every service has its own password. Most of those passwords live inside a password manager on his phone that she cannot open.
Then she has to prove she is allowed to cancel. Some accept an email. Some want a verification code. Some send a link to an old address he has not used in years.
And while she is working her way through all of that, the charges keep coming. Monday. Tuesday. Thursday. Every week.
A son I worked with in March found a magazine subscription auto-renewing on his father's card seven months after he died because nobody had ever logged into his father's personal email to cancel it.
Half of her father's estate was going to go dark because the bank was eventually going to freeze the accounts she needed.
Half of it was going to keep charging for months because every subscription he had was a four-step problem and she did not have any of the four steps.
And by the time she walks into my office, the only person in the world who could have told her any of this in under an hour had stopped being able to speak on Friday.
I have never found a way to tell her this in the hour she sits in front of me.
I have tried.
She was not the first.
I have watched this happen for fifteen years.
Every family thought it was only them.
Every family was wrong.
And the cruellest part is she would not have called herself unprepared. Walking out of my office that afternoon she still thought she had a plan. She did not know she did not.
I recognised the look on her face, because one Tuesday last October I had been in the exact same place she was standing right now.
I drove home from this same office and walked into my own kitchen. My husband was at the table doing the crossword he does every night.
I sat down across from him and stared at him for a long time without saying anything.
Because I had just realised something.
My authenticator app has seventeen accounts in it. My husband has never opened my phone in his life.
Every subscription in our house is on a card in my name alone.
I had been watching adult children discover the same gap in their lives for fifteen years, and I had been running my own household exactly like every one of them.
I had not learned a thing.
I tried to fix it that weekend. I really did.
I started an Excel spreadsheet. Got thirty rows in, read it back to myself, and realised even I could barely make sense of it.
It was a list, not a chain. Imagine my husband trying to follow it.
I even tried a password manager. I downloaded 1Password. Before I had typed anything in, I read it had been hacked a few years earlier. Customers had lost everything. Their details exposed.
Whatever I was looking for, it was not on my phone.
I met a colleague over coffee at our state's funeral directors' annual conference last November. She worked out of a smaller practice two counties over.
She mentioned in passing that she had started handing something out to every family who came in for a pre-need consultation.
Not a form. Not a binder. Not an attorney brochure.
A planner.
She said her clients kept coming back six months later to tell her it was the single most useful thing they walked out of her office with.
She called it the End of Life Planner by Lamorial.
I asked her what made it different, and she said something I had never heard from a single industry resource in fifteen years.
It does not start with the passwords, she said. It starts with the phone. And then it walks every lock in the chain in order for every account.
Every security question. Where to find the authenticators. Where to find the recovery codes. What to do when you are locked out.
Every lock in the chain, in order.
I ordered one for myself on my phone before I finished my coffee. Ten more for the office the next morning.
My husband and I sat down at our kitchen table the following Sunday with it open between us.
He had assumed, for fifteen years, that I of all people must already have this figured out.
He started asking me questions I had been answering for other people for a decade and a half and had never once been asked in my own house.
What is the backup for my authenticator. Which of my accounts are linked to the old email I stopped using in 2018. What is the answer to the security question on our mortgage.
I did not have clean answers to a single one of them.
We found nine accounts in my authenticator he had never seen. Two subscriptions billing the business card I could not remember signing up for. A security question I had answered in 2014 and could not recall under any pressure.
Halfway through he closed the book on his finger and looked up at me.
Fifteen years, he said. And you do not know the answers to your own.
We ordered him his own copy that night.
Ever since then, I have started offering the planner to every family who comes in for a pre-need consultation.
Just recently, a woman called me whose father had passed the week before. She had opened the planner at her father's kitchen table the Monday after he died. Every code within twenty-five minutes. Bank before lunch. Authenticator by dinner. Gym membership cancelled the next day.
She said nobody in my industry had ever given her anything that made the first seventy-two hours feel survivable.
Fifteen years of watching adult children hit the wall. Six months of watching them walk around it.
It is Tuesday afternoon again. Another adult child is sitting in the chair where everybody sits. The paperwork stack is finished.
I slide the probate form across the desk.
And this time, after she signs it, I tell her something I have started telling every family I see.
That the form she just signed is going to start something she will not be able to feel. By Thursday half of her father's life will be locked and the other half will still be charging, and there is nothing I can do from this office to stop any of it.
But I tell her to remember the feeling.
Because right now, at home, there is somebody who relies on her the exact same way her father had been relying on himself. And one day they are going to walk into this office too.
If there is someone in your family whose phone quietly holds everything, there is one question worth asking before anything else.
What happens when the person who knew the recovery codes is the one you are trying to close out.
If the answer is not written down somewhere, step by step, it is not a plan.
It is a ticking clock that nobody realises has already started."
