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Comment by canadianwriter | Hacker News Reader

I guess my issue is figuring out where the value is?

There are legal procedures for anything important (eg. financial accounts). You don't need the password, you just go through the legal frameworks that have been set up for years.

Almost everything else mentioned just doesn't matter that much. My personal site? Why would my wife want access? I guess maybe to put a "good bye" not or something but in the long run it doesn't matter.

My emails? Again, why would my family care? It'll rot away just like I will! (morbid, I know, but I liked the humour!)

The creative stuff I have made is either easily available on the web, or I intentionally don't want it shared, so whatever.

Social media posts and the like are unimportant.

Photos maybe? I have those backed up on an SSD, no password needed for that.

I used to care a lot about this, but over time I just realized how unimportant that stuff is once given a long enough time frame.

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I agree, have you ever had to go through a dead relatives stuff? You can tell it meant something to them, but most of it does not mean anything to you. Most of it gets thrown out, a few things get sold, a few mementos are kept, some of the tools go in a toolbox, a lot goes to Goodwill. Mostly nobody wants it, nobody wants to continue maintaining all your stuff, nobody is going to take over your blog (they'll start their own instead), they are not interested in your kaliedescope collection or collection of antique dinner plates, a lot of your stuff is more worn out and useless than you think even if it works fine for you (as long as you reboot it every Wednesday). They have their own life to live. More expensive assets are worth trying to preserve, but your IoT house system is not a rabbit hole anyone wants to reverse engineer or read the 1000 manual pages about. Concentrate on the important things, let go of the rest. If you have enough warning try giving some of it away. Then you might find someone who will appreciate some of it.

I have a ton of friends I only know over the internet. I'm involved in a few communities as a pretty central figure. This is the weird sorta edge to this. I would like people to know what happened to me, and that I just didn't stop replying to them or leave them. I own a few Discord servers I'd want to pass off.

It's understandable that not everyone has people they talk to weekly where they don't know real names or locations outside of time zones. You say social media posts are unimportant, but I think that's only true if everyone in your social media circle know who you actually are.

Almost the same as me...

I explained to my wife where the SSDs with backups are kept.

I regularly remind her that "the red plastic wallet" contains a printout of our financials. With a death certificate, she can chase up with the bank.

> My emails? Again, why would my family care?

when the author wrote "our emails" my assumption was that the family all has <name>@customdomain - so that would absolutely include the spouse's (and maybe other family members') emails.

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