Preparing the digital estate

Make a list of the digital places that matter: the bank, the email, the photos and other accounts that someone must later be able to recognise. For each place the name of the service and, if you want, the username. No password. Next to each line put what you want to happen to it later, in short words. Close this account. A partner may keep using this album, because you fill it together. You name a joint account as an account, not as an inheritance. The list separates what must be closed from what a partner still needs in ordinary use. It is a map. It is not a key and not a division of what is in those accounts.

DigiD and other accounts with the government are personal. You do not store the login, not as a username and not as a recovery code. Note only that those accounts are personal and that no one signs in as you from this file. The same goes for a government folder: the place where paper you have kept yourself can be found may be noted, the login may not. Passwords for the bank and for email likewise do not belong in a note that every invited reader can see. If a sealed list exists outside the file, the sentence that it exists and who may open it is enough. The keys themselves stay there, outside the circle that may read this file.

What you write about closing or leaving open is a wish. The platform follows its own path, and this note does not compel that platform. Do not write that a partner thereby inherits the account or may keep reading the email in your name. Whether someone may request an account sits with the platform and, where it is about authority, outside this screen. The life file appoints no heir and no executor. Ervazo stores the list you enter. The program does not log in anywhere and does not send the list to a notary or a bank. Go through the list once a year. A service you have cancelled, you remove. A new bank is added on the day you open it.

A life file is a note for later. It is not a will, not a medical instruction and not advice. The account list prepares without handing over keys. It appoints no one as heir or executor. That appointment belongs in a notarial will. A codicil has its own, strictly handwritten form and a list of services is not that form. Ervazo does not send the note to a doctor or a notary. What a partner still uses remains a practical sentence. What must be closed remains a wish until the platform or the bank has done it in its own procedure.