The Digital Legacy Module
The standing orders and per-account dispositions for a person's digital life — what to keep, transfer, memorialize, or delete, and who carries it out.
Where this Module fits
A-04 Module 4 of 8 in the At-Home area — step 2 of 4 on the dependency ladder (System → At-Home → Financial → Estate).
Third of the trio — what happens to it all? Disposition decisions that reference everything the first two modules documented.
Part 3 of 3 in the connected At-Home trio — work Identities, then Subscriptions and Memberships, then Digital Legacy, in that order. See The Connected Trio for the worked example.
Adds to The Secure Guide: General orders per person plus per-account dispositions, sunset plan, digital executor.
Adds to The Family Guide: The crisis-window rule: act only from the plan, verify through the executor.
Every Module adds one section to each guide — that is how the two guides assemble as you work. See what you're building.
Text file — the flexible one. Use it as-is, paste it into a spreadsheet, open it in any editor, or paste it into an AI tool to reshape the blank form to fit your family: rename a field, add a row, drop one you don't need.
Print / PDF — the ready-to-use one. Print it and fill it in by hand, or choose Save as PDF and complete it in your own offline PDF app. Either way it stays with you — the finished Secure Guide template goes inside your Vault.
One rule: only ever give an AI tool the blank template. Never paste your real information — passwords, account numbers, anything you'd keep secret — into an AI tool, an online service, or anywhere outside your own Vault. Customizing an empty form is fine; filling it in happens privately, offline. That's the same rule this site follows: nothing sensitive ever leaves your hands.
Secure Guide Starter Template — Digital Legacy
Store this inside your Vault. One general-orders entry per person — children's accounts and footprints count too — plus per-account disposition rows. Update at the annual review.
Third of the trio, and the one the other two were building toward: identities say who has authority, subscriptions say what needs addressing — this record says what happens to each. You are not deciding everything today. A basic preference per major account is enough to start.
Two rules run through every row. First: no legitimate process — platform, exchange, attorney, executor — ever needs a recovery phrase typed into a website, read over a phone, or sent in a message. Anyone asking, however convincing, is the attack. Second: prefer disposition mechanisms that work through a platform's authenticated process rather than through anyone's judgment of a convincing request — activating a legacy tool is a security act, not just an administrative one.
| Account / Service | Disposition | Timeline | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
Delete / transfer / memorialize / archive — reference the Identities and Subscriptions entries rather than re-entering them. The Transferable? column of the Subscriptions catalog feeds this table.
Family Guide Starter Template — Digital Legacy
This template contains no sensitive information. It can be stored with household documents.
In the matching Secure Guide section: general orders per person plus per-account dispositions, sunset plan, digital executor.
That detail is what makes recovery possible — and it is protected in the Vault, which opens with The Vault Key. The key is never written here, by design. The people listed on this page know how it is kept, and the steward's job is to keep that path current, so this page never leads to a locked door.
Anything this page's reader should know that the sections above didn't ask for — the exceptions, the house quirks, the thing you would say out loud while handing this page over.
For more information on how to use these templates, see The Recoverable Family book.
Worked example — Frank's family
A colleague of Frank's died suddenly, and Frank watched the widow spend months fighting for email access, canceling subscriptions she discovered one statement at a time, and pleading with customer-service departments that had no process for grief. Frank had the first two trio records done — who they are, what they belong to. Six weeks later he had the answer to the third question: what happens to it all.
All details are fictional and illustrative. The assembled example guides live at the example Secure Guide and the example Family Guide.
Secure Guide — Frank's entry
Frank's general-orders entry, in the At-Home folder of his encrypted Secure Guide volume. Sarah's own entry follows the same shape.
| Account / Service | Disposition | Timeline | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gmail (see Identities: Frank) | Transfer to Sarah, then delete | 90-day review, archive, delete | The master key — the sunset plan below is this row in detail |
| Facebook profile | Memorialize | At death | Legacy contact designated: Sarah — can pin a post and manage the tribute page, cannot read messages |
| Streaming + subscriptions | Cancel | First month | Work straight down the Subscriptions catalog — renewal column names the card each one charges |
| mercerfamily.net (registered 15 years) | Transfer to Sarah — keep | Before first renewal | NameHarbor registrar — unlock steps and transfer-code procedure documented; the family website rides on it |
| Photo library | Archive + transfer | Within 90 days | Bulk export takes days at this size — start early; two copies per the Backup Module |
| Work email | Archive then close | Employer retention period | Employer-owned; nothing personal rides on it (kept that way on purpose — see Identities) |
| Money-valued digital assets | See the Digital Financial Assets Module | — | Documented and dispositioned there, not here — including the crypto position closed in 2026 |
A living document, not a monument: when the crypto position moved to the Digital Financial Assets Module's books, this table's row updated the same day. When Lily asked what happens to the family photos, the answer was a walk-through of the archive row — not a promise to figure it out someday.
Family Guide — Frank's entry
This entry sits in the household reference binder. It holds the one rule the family must know without opening anything.