The accounts outlive us.

Facebook

• Name a Legacy Contact — a person you choose who can manage your memorialized profile: pin a tribute post, update the profile photo, respond to friend requests.
• Decide, in your settings, whether you want your account memorialized after death or permanently deleted, and record that choice.
• Download a copy of your information periodically — your photos and posts may be the family album nobody realized was being kept.

• Survivors can request memorialization, which freezes the account as a remembrance page — 'Remembering' appears with the name, and login is disabled, which also protects the account from hacking.
• Immediate family can instead request full removal of the account, with documentation such as a death certificate.
• If a Legacy Contact was named, they can manage the memorialized profile; nobody, including the Legacy Contact, gets access to private messages.

facebook.com/help/

Google

• Set up Inactive Account Manager — the most complete planning tool any platform offers. You choose a timeout period, and if the account goes unused that long, Google notifies your trusted contacts.
• Choose what happens next: share selected data (Gmail, Google Photos, Drive) with up to a handful of trusted contacts, delete the account entirely, or both in sequence.
• Take the timeout seriously — Google Photos may hold the family's entire photographic history. Naming a trusted contact for Photos alone justifies the setup time.

• If Inactive Account Manager was configured, trusted contacts receive access to whatever was shared, automatically, once the timeout passes.
• If it wasn't, Google has a formal request process for closing a deceased person's account and, in limited cases, obtaining data — expect documentation requirements and a slow, case-by-case review.
• Act before inactivity policies do: unused accounts and their photo libraries can be deleted under inactivity rules, so don't let a deceased person's account simply sit for years.

myaccount.google.com/inactive

Apple

• Add a Legacy Contact for your Apple account — they'll be able to access your iCloud data (photos, notes, backups) after your death.
• The access key is the part people miss: when you name a Legacy Contact, Apple generates one, and the contact needs both that key and a death certificate to get in. No key, no access — even for your spouse.
• Print the access key and keep it with your estate papers, or make sure the contact has stored their copy somewhere durable. Treat it as seriously as the deed to the house.

• A named Legacy Contact requests access with the access key plus a death certificate; Apple then provides a period of access to the person's iCloud data.
• Without a Legacy Contact, access generally requires a court order — a slow, expensive path with no guaranteed result. There is a simpler process for closing the account outright.
• Before requesting deletion of anything, remember the phone itself: a locked iPhone without the passcode may be unrecoverable, so preserve any device passcode you have.

support.apple.com/

Instagram

• Instagram's legacy planning rides with Meta — settings and memorialization behavior are tied to the same family of accounts as Facebook, so plan them together.
• Save your own archive periodically: for many people Instagram is the only place a decade of daily-life photos exists.

• Survivors can request memorialization; the account freezes as it was, marked 'Remembering', and no one can log into it.
• Verified immediate family can request removal of the account instead, with documentation.
• Download-worthy content should be saved before requesting anything — memorialized accounts are frozen, and removed ones are gone.

help.instagram.com/

X (Twitter)

• There is no legacy-contact feature and no memorial mode — plan accordingly. If the account's contents matter to you, download your archive while you can and store it with your other papers.
• If you want the account to outlive you in any form, the only real mechanism is leaving instructions and credentials in your password manager's emergency access (see below).

• Family members or estate representatives can request deactivation of a deceased person's account, with documentation — typically a death certificate and proof of relationship.
• The platform does not offer memorialization and does not grant login access to survivors, so anything worth keeping (photos, threads, the bio in their own words) should be captured before the deactivation request.

help.x.com/

LinkedIn

• Little to configure ahead of time — but a current copy of your profile doubles as a career history for your family and your obituary writer, so export it once in a while.

• Survivors can request memorialization of the profile, which preserves it while locking it from logins and from appearing in hiring-related contexts.
• Authorized family or estate representatives can request full removal instead, with documentation of the death and their authority.
• A lingering active profile invites painful automated emails ('congratulate them on their work anniversary') to colleagues — handling it promptly is a kindness to their network.

linkedin.com/help/

Microsoft

• Microsoft has a next-of-kin process rather than a legacy-contact feature — so the practical planning step is keeping your Outlook/OneDrive contents represented in your password manager's emergency access.
• If family photos live in OneDrive, treat it like Google Photos: make sure a second person can reach them by some route.

• A next-of-kin process exists for closing a deceased person's account; expect documentation and, for data release, potentially a court order depending on jurisdiction.
• Watch for the practical tangle: a Microsoft account is often the login for a family PC. Preserve access to the computer before closing the account that unlocks it.

support.microsoft.com/

Email accounts (any provider)

• Email is the master key: nearly every other account resets its password through it. Whoever controls your email can eventually control almost everything else — plan for it with exactly that seriousness.
• Ensure your email is covered by whichever mechanism you use — Google's Inactive Account Manager, a password manager's emergency access, or a sealed-letter arrangement.
• Keep the recovery phone number and backup codes current; an out-of-date recovery number is the most common way families get locked out forever.

• Secure the email account first, before anything else — it is the reset path for the banks, the subscriptions, and everything below.
• Do not close it early. Keep it open (secured) for a year or more: estate notices, forgotten-account discoveries, and password resets for accounts nobody knew about all arrive there.
• Search the inbox for 'welcome', 'receipt', 'statement', and 'subscription' — it is the single best map of the accounts the person actually had.

Phone & voicemail

• Write the phone's PIN into your emergency-access arrangement. A locked phone is a locked life — photos, texts, authenticator apps, all of it.
• If your voice matters to someone, record your voicemail greeting deliberately — for some families it becomes the only recording of the voice.

• URGENT — before any account is closed or any plan is cancelled: record the voicemail greeting. Call the number from another phone and capture the greeting with a voice recorder, and ask the carrier about retrieving saved messages. Carriers delete voicemail fast — often within weeks of a plan closing — and no documentation gets it back.
• Keep the phone line active for a few months if you can afford to: it receives the two-factor codes needed to get into everything else.
• Preserve the device before wiping or returning it — texts and photos on the phone may exist nowhere else.

Password managers

• This is the single best modern solution to the whole problem — say it plainly: one well-set-up password manager with emergency access replaces most of this page.
• 1Password-style family plans and Bitwarden-style emergency access both work the same way in spirit: you name a trusted person who can request access, and after a waiting period you control (and can veto while alive), they get in.
• Set it up, name your person, test the request flow once, and then keep everything — passwords, the phone PIN, the crypto keys, the Apple access key — inside it. The password manager becomes the estate's front door.

• If emergency access was configured, the named contact requests access and receives the entire vault after the waiting period — no court, no death certificate queue, no guessing.
• If it wasn't, check for a printed 'emergency kit' or recovery sheet in the person's papers; several password managers encourage printing one, and families find them in fireproof boxes and desk drawers.
• Without either, the vault is generally unrecoverable by design — which is exactly why the while-living column matters more here than anywhere else on this page.

Identity & access

• The phone PIN — start here. The phone unlocks everything else: texts, photos, authenticator codes, saved passwords.
• Email accounts, every one of them — email is the master key that resets all other locks.
• The password manager, its master password, and its emergency-access setup or printed recovery kit.
• Two-factor devices and backup codes — where they are and what they protect.

Money

• Bank accounts and credit cards, including the online-only banks with no branch to walk into.
• Investment and retirement accounts, and the beneficiary designations on each.
• PayPal, Venmo, Cash App, and other payment apps — balances sit in these more often than people admit.
• Cryptocurrency — and the honest truth: without the keys or seed phrase, crypto is simply gone. No company to petition, no court order that helps. If it exists, its keys belong in the estate plan today.

Bills & home

• Utilities — electric, gas, water, internet, phone — and which are on autopay from which account.
• Insurance policies: home, auto, life, health — including the employer-provided life insurance families forget exists.
• Streaming services and subscriptions — the quiet monthly charges that outlive their owner by years if nobody makes a list.

The sentimental

• Photo libraries — often the family's entire photographic history, living in a cloud account one missed password away from loss. Google Photos, iCloud, Amazon Photos: name them, and make sure a second person can reach them.
• Social media accounts — a decade of everyday photos and the person's own voice in their own words.
• Voicemails and the voicemail greeting — the recordings of the voice. Flag these as time-critical everywhere they exist.
• Text and chat threads — for many families, the last conversations live only there.

Work & professional

• Work accounts and where personal files might be tangled into them — and the employer contact who handles offboarding.
• Professional profiles, portfolios, and personal websites.
• Freelance and marketplace accounts (Etsy, eBay, consulting platforms) that may hold balances or ongoing obligations.

Devices themselves

• Phones, laptops, tablets — each with its own lock, each potentially the only home of something irreplaceable.
• External drives, USB sticks, and memory cards in drawers — the shoeboxes of the digital age.
• The old computer in the closet that 'still has stuff on it.' It does. Inventory it before recycling anything.

Loyalty & miles

• Airline miles and hotel points — transferable to family more often than people think, but usually only if requested rather than left to lapse.
• Retail loyalty balances and gift-card credit sitting in store accounts.
• Check each program's policy before closing anything; the value evaporates the day the account does.

The weird ones

• Domain names — they expire quietly, and with them the family business's web address or a lifetime of email.
• Game accounts and their libraries — sometimes thousands of dollars of purchases, sometimes a world a grandchild would love to inherit.
• Creator accounts that earn — YouTube channels, newsletters, app-store accounts, print-on-demand shops — with revenue that keeps flowing to a bank account somebody needs to know about.