2026-08-20
How to leave your family access to your passwords and accounts, without a plain-text list
48% of Americans have no instructions in place for what should happen to their digital accounts and files when they die — not a will, not a note, nothing — according to Trust & Will's 2026 Estate Planning Report, a nationally representative survey of 5,000 U.S. adults fielded January 28–February 5, 2026. The gap doesn't close much even for people who did the rest of the paperwork: 23% of will-holders in the same survey have made no digital arrangements at all. Of the people who do plan for it, a lot of the planning looks the same way it did decades ago. A 2026 Carnegie Mellon CyLab study that interviewed 21 older adults about exactly this found most of them relying on a handwritten list — "a sheet of paper, this little notebook with all of my passwords," as one participant put it — and "almost none" had even heard of the "legacy contact" features built into major platforms. A password list, on paper or in a file, is a real plan. It's also, handed to the wrong person or left somewhere insecure, a complete inventory of every account you have. The fix isn't a better list — it's making sure the list itself isn't readable by anyone who finds it before the person you meant it for does.
What actually belongs in the file
Before encryption is even a question, the file has to be useful to whoever opens it. The CMU study found participants overwhelmingly prioritized financial account access over social media or photo preservation, and that's a reasonable place to start a checklist: the primary email account (most other password resets flow through it, so it belongs at the top, not buried in the middle), banking and brokerage logins, insurance policies, any cryptocurrency wallet or seed phrase, bill and subscription accounts someone will need to cancel, and where any local backups or cloud photo libraries actually live. A short paragraph of plain instructions — who to call first, what's urgent versus what can wait — is worth more to a grieving family member than a spreadsheet with no context. None of that has to be fancy. A plain text file, a saved document, even a spreadsheet export all work the same way once the next step is applied to them.
Encrypt the file, then keep the passphrase somewhere else entirely
The list and the key to the list shouldn't travel together, for the same reason a spare house key doesn't get taped to the front door. Encrypt the file itself with a passphrase, and the document stops being a plain inventory the moment it leaves your device — what sits in a cloud drive, an external drive in a safe deposit box, or a copy handed to your executor is unreadable ciphertext, not a list of every login you own. The passphrase then travels through a separate channel: written into the physical documents your attorney already keeps with your will, sealed in an envelope with instructions for when to open it, or given only to the one person you'd trust with all of it anyway. Whoever eventually needs the file has to have both pieces — the ciphertext and the passphrase — and neither one by itself is useful to someone who finds only it.
Why the "legacy contact" button in your accounts doesn't cover this
Most major platforms now offer some version of a feature for what happens to an account after you die — Google calls it Inactive Account Manager, Apple and Facebook call it Legacy Contact, under a handful of other names elsewhere. The CMU study's finding on this was blunt: "almost none" of its 21 participants had even heard of these features, and the ones who considered them found the inconsistent labeling across platforms ("legacy," "memorialization," "inactive account manager") confusing on its own. Even for someone who does set one up, each is scoped to that one platform — Google's setting does nothing for a bank login, a password manager, or a cryptocurrency wallet, and there is no equivalent feature at most financial institutions at all. An encrypted file with a passphrase given to someone separately doesn't have that limitation: it works for anything you can write down, not just the handful of services that happen to have built a feature for it.
Confirm your heir can actually open it, before you're not there to explain it
An encrypted file that only makes sense to the person who made it isn't a plan, it's a puzzle. Whoever you're leaving this for should know, in advance, roughly what the file is, where the encrypted copy lives, and where the passphrase will come from — not be left to figure out three separate mysteries at once during an already difficult week. It's worth actually walking a less technical family member through opening a test file once, the same way it's worth testing a backup by restoring it rather than assuming it works. And it's worth being honest about the one real tradeoff here: a passphrase-derived key has no reset mechanism, by design — nobody, including NearSeal, ever holds a copy of it to recover. That's exactly what keeps the file safe from everyone who isn't the intended heir, but it also means a lost passphrase is unrecoverable, so the copy kept with the attorney or in the safe deposit box isn't optional, it's the whole plan.
Where NearSeal fits
NearSeal runs entirely in the browser — the file and the passphrase never leave the device,
there's no account and no upload step for either, which matters here specifically because the file
being encrypted is, by definition, a list of your other accounts. By default it derives an
AES-256-GCM key from your passphrase via PBKDF2-SHA256 at 220 iterations; if you'd
rather the file stay openable by the standalone age or
rage CLI as well — not dependent on this specific website still existing whenever it's
eventually needed — there's an opt-in age-encryption.org
format instead, which is exactly the kind of long-horizon, don't-assume-any-one-app-stays-online
use case that format exists for. Either way, encrypt the account list once, store the resulting
file as broadly as you want, and treat the passphrase as the one thing that never goes in the same
place as the file.