Heritkey

What a family couldn't find: three months of unlocking a parent's accounts

· 6 min read

Most people imagine that sorting out a parent's online life after they die takes an afternoon. For many families it takes months. The story below is an example, put together from the situations families commonly describe. The names are invented; the obstacles are real.

This is an illustrative scenario, not a real customer story. Heritkey is launching soon and has no customers yet.

Week 1: the phone

When Martin's mother died, her iPhone was on the kitchen table. Everything was on it: her photos, her contacts, her banking app, and the text messages that carry the codes to log in to almost everything else. Nobody knew her passcode.

The family tried birthdays and anniversaries until the phone started locking them out for longer and longer. Apple can't remove a passcode without erasing the phone, and erasing it would delete whatever wasn't stored anywhere else. She hadn't set up a Legacy Contact. Our guide on unlocking a deceased person's iPhone explains why this is so common.

Weeks 2 to 6: the email

Her email account was the key to everything: bills, statements, subscriptions and photo storage were all linked to it. Without the password, and with the verification codes going to a locked phone, the family couldn't get in. Requests to the email provider required a death certificate and proof of who they were, and the answer, when it came, was a case-by-case decision that didn't include access to the messages themselves.

Weeks 4 to 10: the money

The bank and the pension provider were straightforward in one sense: they have their own procedures for bereavement, and the executor followed them. The hard part was knowing which institutions existed. There was no list. Statements came by email to an inbox nobody could open. One savings account was found only when a paper letter arrived months later.

Weeks 6 to 12: the subscriptions

Streaming services, a magazine, cloud storage and a charity donation kept charging her card. Each had to be found from the bank statement, contacted separately and cancelled with a death certificate. Some took a phone call; one took three.

What was lost for good

Ten years of photos in a cloud account the family never managed to open. A folder of notes she had written for her grandchildren, mentioned once at a family dinner, never found.

What would have made it a weekend's work

None of this needed a lawyer or a lot of money. A few hours, a few years earlier, would have been enough:

  1. A list of accounts and what should happen to each. Our digital estate planning checklist takes about an hour.
  2. The phone passcode, kept somewhere safe that the right person could reach.
  3. The platform tools: Apple Legacy Contact for her iCloud photos and Google Inactive Account Manager if she used Gmail.
  4. The passwords, including email, in a place designed to be handed over, not in the will. See why passwords don't belong in a will.
  5. A few words of instruction: what to keep, what to close, and who to call.

How common is this?

Very. In a May 2024 survey of 1,000 US adults by All About Cookies, 34% said they hadn't shared their digital assets with anyone, and 39% kept that information only in their heads. In a 2021 survey by 1Password with Willful and Trust & Will, only 36% of millennials said they knew or had access to their parents' online passwords.

Where Heritkey fits

We're building Heritkey so that families don't lose months like these. You put your passwords, accounts, documents and messages in an encrypted vault, choose your heirs, and set a waiting period. If something happens, they request access; if you don't refuse within the waiting period, the vault opens for them. Until then, nobody can read it, not even us. See how Heritkey works.

Whether you use Heritkey or not, start with the list. It's the single most useful thing you can leave your family.

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