When I’m dead and gone…

… the executors and anyone else needing access to the documentation about my estate could have several problems. The same applies in the case of my wife, Ruth:

• a lot of our insurance policies, contracts and so on are in German
• the remainder are in English, so an understanding of both languages will be helpful
• our computers at home are Macs, (many people have no idea how use a Mac, even if they are happy using a Windows PC)
• Quite a lot of key information on our hard disks is encrypted

We have set up documentation of how to access the data on our Macs for our relations, but I think we need to do more. The situation will become more fraught for our family if / when we move to Spain, which is our long-term retirement plan – if global warming hasn’t turned the Iberian peninsula into a desert by then. Then they can add Spanish to the list of necessary languages.

Cory Doctorow, writing in The Guardian yesterday covers the last point on my list in his article “When I’m dead, how will my loved ones break my password?“. Worth a look if you use password managers or encrypted hardware on your home computer. And it underlines that providing secure data protection while you are alive, while allowing others access to the necessary passwords when you are no longer around or have become senile is not a trivial exercise.

And family, if you are reading this – we promise to improve the situation, but learning German will undoubtedly make life a little less complicated when the time comes!