Included in the doc should be a walkthrough for how to access MFA on various phones. How to recover MFA tokens using Authenticator apps, I recommend Microsoft’s Authenticator as it has cloud backup. Beyond the MFA, how do you access more hardened accounts like a password vault or critical account where security keys are used. Yubikeys are pretty great, but aren’t that easy to figure out for the non tech.

How do you access legacy accounts? Where are the powers of attorney (us specific) and how do you use them? What insurance agents and financial advisers need to be contacted?

Probably not important for most of the potential users, but when you are already retired, there are a few specific things to look at.

• inform the pension fund, and make arrangements to get the monthly widower/widow payment to the correct account. In most European countries one is in any case legally obliged to inform the Pension Fund in case a household member passes away.
• already mentioned, talk to your Investment Advisor (mostly a bank contact) to see how all insurances, but also how long term investments bound to a person, shall be handled.
• for those that have it, contact the Sickness Insurance person to make sure there is no interruption in Sickness Insurance coverage
• make sure any saving/investment accounts for grand-children, or any other beneficiaries, are continued or transferred. It might require changing the monthly money transfer order with the bank.
• in several European countries shared bank accounts are blocked for some time after one of the account holders passes away. This to avoid short-dealing the State on any inheritance taxes. Make sure there are some funds available for immediate costs (hospital, funeral, ...). Discuss this with your Bank contact in advance, and write down what was agreed.

I'll add more if I think of other specific "retiree" matters.

VPN info

We should all be using a password manager and 2FA, but perhaps the less technical-savvy survivor is not keen or able, to use that immediately after one passes away.

I do like, and use, the idea of the "Notes" option that most modern password managers now seem to have.
That is ideal to store information that is not purely account/password.
Things like PIN codes, contract numbers, ...

I also like the idea of a safe location to store that info in hard-copy format.

But how to organise a regular "dump" of that info to such a hard copy?
We can script that, but how and from where would that script run?
And where to store the hard copy?

Just some practical questions I don't have a definitive answer to yet.

If you have a safe or weapons of sorts.

You would think your spouse would have that info but there are circumstances all to often like mine. My spouse has severe depression thus CAN NOT have access to my safe or the backup weapon lock keys. So you can imagine what could happen if she got to them shortly after I went up state to play with the doggos.

My thought for NON ISSUE spouses that ARE ALLOWED to access these things (maybe just wanted nothing to do with whatever) if there is a digital lock or physical combination lock put that code into your password manager. If you have a physical key as primary or backup to the electronic lock; let them know where you hide it. In my case even explaining to them were it is you may have to add a photo in your password manager or email it to yourself not giving details as to what it is (some PM don't allow stoage). Then in the body put a specific string they can search for and find just that email.

For CAN NOT HAVE DIRECT ACCESS spouse... I personally wouldn't trust anyone with my spare key or give them a code or the combination. So I would get a good small fireproof safe with a physical combination. Then email it to the person you trust and tell them never delete it cause blah blah reason. You can do the same search string thing for them but MAKE SURE YOU DELETE IT FROM YOUR SENT folder. Have spouse turn over the small safe at time of death, search string so they can find the email, and instructions on what to do with the weapons.

You can also add a layer of security and add maths to the combo on either or both safes. E.G. put a combo in the document that is not going to open the safe but until spouse contacts trustee the numbers are useless. The trustee will have an email with spouse's first digit plus 6 second digit pluse 1 third digit minus 5 which is the actual small safe combo. That gives you a degree of separation if say the government wants your guns and gets your death letter with the wrong combo.

You can also change it so that spouse is notified that a person they know/know of will approch them upon ur death. So for further separation you can incude in ur FB Twitter announcement that if someone was sent an email you told them never to delete contact your spouse with the information.

With that approach you can actually give multiple people different math problems with different key phrases they tell ur spouse and list which phrase is first access with backups down the line. Never know who is going to still be close to or out live you years from now. You can easily edit the list for your spouse if you need to add/remove or prioritize; instead of having to worry about fixing the list and getting a new trustee immediately if something happens to them.

per a bunch of comments on reddit and twitter, good idea 👍🏼

Ralph has a lot of great ideas!

https://github.com/RalphHightower/EOL-RalphHightower

With IoT most houses now have some form of automation going on.

There should be documents (in hard copy format) describing the basic procedures for all these technical elements.

Just to start a very incomplete list:

• home automation
• power consumption monitor
• robots (vacuum, lawnmower, ...)

The usual... What was your elementary school, first car, father's middle name....

Not sure this falls under the home lab section, maybe a new section is needed, not really sure?! What about a section for things like photo backups, how to continue backing up photos, where things like this currently go and how to if they want stop photos backing up.

People tend to know how to back photos up online and how things like OneDrive, Google Drive etc. work but if you don't have a spouse and are relying on your parents who might not be as tech savvy they might not know what OneDrive is or even how to get onto it or what is stored there? I know mine wouldn't.

Same thing goes for things like a local NAS - what is on there, what the NAS is, how to get to it and how to get the important things off it then what to do with it once the things that are important are removed.

I see a couple places mentioning destroying or formatting hard drives. These days it would probably be good to include mentioning SSDs as well, maybe using other common terms e.g. "M.2" or "NVMe". Probably a Tech Tip to simply never get rid of them or else to get them destroyed if the successor can't figure out what to do with each one.

I still haven't figured out how to properly and thoroughly wipe these if it's even possible. Maybe someone else can provide better guidance.

Most of the time, we just turn off the internet modem and things come back up. But other times, I do have to go upstairs to reset our upstairs APs. Explain location and how to reset (Philips Hue is hooked up there)

let her know that unifi takes long as heck to come back online and just wait like 10 minutes

This is a good stop gap till a friend comes by and sets up something easier and move the Hue hub downstairs