This hits close to home. As a cybersecurity and tech professional, I’m often asked for similar advice, but on the digital side. Managing passwords, accounts, that entire technical footprint we all accumulate.
I’ve lost two employees: Jason Fehrs and Kevin Lee. I think about them a lot. Both times, their loved ones were locked out of accounts and struggling to find their footing after sudden loss. Ghost profiles still celebrating birthdays on Facebook. Work anniversaries on LinkedIn. It’s not just an aging issue. It hits mid-career professionals just as hard, often harder.
And the industry has failed them. The advice out there is poor, dated, and lacks any real risk assessment. In both cases, a password manager is what saved their spouses from drowning in those ghost accounts. It helped them land on their feet. I was able to help recover access, but it would have been so much easier with a little planning, like we do to set up beneficiaries on financial accounts.
I’m actually optimistic about this space. LLMs like Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini are already giving better guidance than most of the grifters and uninformed advice floating around. There’s real potential to fix this.