Digital Life Brief
What happens to your online life when you can't reach it — and how the household keeps the doors open.
What this brief is
An institutional brief on the practical architecture of a household's digital life: the accounts that matter, the access routes that fail when no one knows the password manager exists, and the separation between the Vault (artefacts) and the Emergency Kit (secrets) sealed at the solicitor.
The sample household
Sample uses the Pemberton-Walsh household — Sarah (44), Mark (46), Lily (8), Tom (5). Mark runs Walsh Design Studio Ltd; the brief covers the consumer and business sides of the digital footprint together.
How this brief is read
Read the sample on this page, using the Pemberton-Walsh household throughout.
Open a free account and the brief becomes editable with your own data — your records, your trusted persons, your professional advisers.
Household Continuity Dossier membership (£195 first year, then £99/year) holds the record on the register, prompts the annual review, and issues the Governance Letter when a circumstance changes.
From the brief
An average UK adult in 2026 holds more than ninety online accounts, four to six email addresses, thirty to forty financial accounts across banks, brokers, pensions, ISAs and crypto, a cloud archive holding the family's visual history, and a password manager that quietly holds the keys to all of it. None of this is in your will. None of it appears in a probate inventory. And almost none of it can be lawfully accessed by your family after your death without the right architecture in place now.
This brief is the architectural map for setting that up. It is not a password document. It is a handover protocol — designed to work within the Computer Misuse Act 1990, using each platform's own legacy mechanisms.
Read this once. Using a deceased person's passwords — even to "help" administer the estate — is almost always unlawful unauthorised access under the Computer Misuse Act 1990, however kind the intent. The lawful route is platform-specific: Apple Legacy Contact, Google Inactive Account Manager, Facebook Memorialisation Contact, and so on. This brief shows you how to set each one up while you have capacity.
The password manager — the central key
Record the password manager your household uses (1Password, Bitwarden, Apple Keychain, Dashlane). The provider name itself is not sensitive; the recovery key is. The recovery key never goes in this document.
Most consumer password managers (1Password, Dashlane, Bitwarden) issue a one-page printed Emergency Kit at setup. Print it. Sign it. Seal it in a tamper-evident envelope. Store with your solicitor or in a bank deposit box. Note its location here: e.g. "Sealed envelope with Sarah Lyon at Hartley & Bain LLP, marked DLB-PW-2026."
Email — the recovery root
Almost every online account in your life resets through one email address. That address is the master key. Lose access to it and the rest cascades.
The full brief continues — personalised with your household's details.