When I Die · Michał Góral

What happens when I die? This question haunts me. I’m worried about my relatives who, without me being around, would be left with a technological and non-technological mess I’m leaving behind. I’m worried that the day I’m gone they’ll learn about the scope and complexity of things they depend on.

Here I’m exploring some ways to mitigate these problems and make their lives easier.

Perfect and not Perfect Solutions

I believe that perfect solutions should be transparent. My relatives shouldn’t even think about them. Of course we have to do X, because this is what a sane person would do!

But perfect solutions are not always possible, so next best thing is to not require any technological savviness from my relatives. Forget about Docker, command line and long, weird instructions. Web browser max I can expect from them to use.

Next best thing are checklists which tell what must be done, without assuming how it’s done. I musn’t require my relatives to use any of my devices (phone, laptop) to perform any of these tasks. They must be able to use their own laptop which they’re familiar with. They already have enough on their heads to fight with a computer which is configured for a hardcore programmer.

Why such strict approach? Because of a comment I recently read on Hacker News:

I am picturing a room full of non-programmers staring at all these documents, codes and Docker commands and saying “Well, Greg was obviously crazy. Instead of leaving any of his passwords, he just left pages of gibberish. I guess we’ll never be able to access anything.”

– xp84

Incapacitation

Death isn’t the only thing that worries me. Once I die, my family has at least some legal options in terms of inheritance, liabilities or transfering assets. But what happens when I’m incapacitated? It’s the area which you can’t navigate without a court order and these take time. Thus, my solutions to the question what happens when I die should also work in times when I’m not dead, but when I’m not able to help in any way.

IT Infrastructure

We have a family wiki where I leave all the instructions. For years I struggled to make them clear and concise so my relatives can follow them. This section of this post was pending since 2023 and it didn’t feel right. I had to do something about it. Death can find us anytime after all.

Recently I had a realisation: nobody will learn how to manage our IT infrastructure from a bunch of documents which I’m going to leave behind me. It would be egoistic of me to expect that my relatives will have enough willpower and free time to do so. A self host a lot of things, so a lot of things can break. I can’t pass that torch. The only sane way for my family to proceed after I’m gone is to turn these things off and learn to live without them.

I have created a checklist which reads like this:

Buy a big external drive

Backup the following things from our NAS: photos, documents, etc. (here are links and file paths). You can access NAS from the web interface: (web addresses, including local IP)

Backup all the passwords and copy them to the official Bitwarden server (I self host Vaultwarden which I expect to fail one day)

Move events from self-hosted calendar to some external CalDAV server, or even a local phone calendar.

Replace payment info for the most important subscriptions, like e-mail or domain (which is tied to e-mail)

Find AC remotes and start using them; install official apps for “smart” devices; hire someone to change the thermostat for our heater to the “dumb” one.

Turn off NAS and sell it, stop paying for VPS etc.

Regarding backup, if you use a service which keeps data in database, make sure that they’ll be able to export data in human-readable form. For example, I don’t want them to loose our wiki, so I chose a dokuwiki, which is just a bunch of text files to copy.

Money

Savings

We have diverse saving/investing wallet. I keep a list of entities (banks, funds etc.) which has our money and that’s it. They’re all accessed online, so there shouldn’t be a technical problem with access to money – only legal one, but I can’t do anything about it. They have the list, it’s up to them now.

Shared Mailbox for Bills and Other Errands

I pay bills in our house – I mean the physical act of collecting the bills each month, logging into the bank account and issuing bank transfers. Historically, I had received most of bills to my personal mailbox, but for few years I have switched to a “team mailbox”. It’s better and more transparent to my family this way.

We like the idea of “shared” mailbox for things which affect us all (like contracts with a school, bills, hotel reservations etc). We use it every day, alongside our personal mailboxes, whenever we need to give an e-mail address for some institution, so there’s no learning curve and no instructions are necessary. It’s something they already are familiar with.

Automated Transactions

Whenever I can, I always setup monthly instalments at my bank for the whole paying period. It’s easy on me (and my poor memory) today and it’ll be easy on my family after I’m gone.

Keep it Offline

Things must work without internet access, or even without computer access. It means:

Checklists must be printed and safely put in a place which my family will check. I keep them in a safe, together with my passport. I suspect that they will collect my documents, so they’ll stumble upon it.
We use Bitwarden to share some passwords, but I also bought a notebook and wrote down the most crucial ones. I try to keep it safe - in a safe, inside a “high security bag”, which is impossible to seal again without leaving a trace. This way I’m sure that even though passwords are written down, which is bad security practice, no one accessed it.
Smart devices must work and be controllable offline. No cloud, no LAN. Smart switches must have physical buttons. Air conditioners must use remotes. The list goes on. This is ongoing effort: I don’t buy devices which require connecting to a server, even if I own the server.
Print photos and make an album. Gigabytes of digital photos sit on the disk and collect digital dust, but we flip through physical albums every few months. They’re the most important “books” in our house.