I deliberately called this ‘when you die’ and not ‘if you died’. With death being pretty much the only inevitable thing in our lifes, it is astonishing how little most people are prepared for it. Perhaps, most people think that they still have decades until they will be gone, others knowingly or unknowingly, chose to ignore it.

There may also be other reasons for not preparing for the worst. If you don’t have a written will, your belongings will simply be passed on to the closest relatives in most countries, which probably is what most deceased would have wanted anyways. Not having an organ donor card may be accounted with either not wanting to be an organ donor or simply being too lazy to fill one out (please take the time, it’s not even 5 minutes!) thinking the people missing out on a new lung are not people you knew anyways.

Do your loved ones even know you hold crypto?

But do your loved ones even know you are holding crypto currencies? Do they know the exchanges and wallets you store them on? Do they know your passwords or private keys? Even if they knew all this, would they know what the heck to do with those? Could you imagine your spouse importing your recovery phrase or navigating MetaMask?

We love to talk about mass adoption being here and how easy to use all of this stuff has become. Well, compare it to 2013 and you’re right. But compare it to today’s standards of online banking and you’ll notice a gap, that takes hours of reading FAQs and tutorials before being able to overcome it.

Of course it depends on how big your stash is

So, you’re holding 100 DOGE? You might stop reading here and go back to Twitter. But if you’re stash is bigger, don’t you think it would be a huge help to your family if anything should happen to you?

Personally, I sold my coins. However, I am still not holding fiat but BUSD and USDT amounting to 10k USD. I am also holding 8.5k USD worth of Splinterlands cards. I am convinced CZ would love to see that never going out of Binance and aggroed may be happy about Beta cards becoming harder to acquire driving up the market cap. But my wife would probably prefer cashing out the money.

Try not to overload them with techy stuff

Let’s learn from someone who might be closer to death, than ourselves: Warren Buffet. The guy was once an investment mogul, now he’s a geezer who still believes he’s the best choice to drive our roads of finance despite better having returned his ‘license’ decades ago. However, he does not expect the same from others. His advice, should his wife inherit his money, was simple: “Put 10% of the cash in short-term government bonds and 90% in a very low-cost S&P 500 index fund.” The man does not expect his wife to identify the best investments opportunities by giving her a crash course. He wants her to take the money to a safe, easy to understand place.

So instead of trying to make your spouse learn how to ride the next Bitcoin cycle, you should enable him/her to cash out your investment.

What steps should you take?

I don’t know about your situation, but I can at least tell you what I did.

1. Tell them you own crypto.
   Seriously, this is the most obvious but also most important step. Why would they try to crack your bitcoin wallet if you never told them that hard drive was a Ledger Nano and not your private p***n collection stored on SSD.

2. Make your passwords and key accessible.
   Delicate topic and of course to be handled responsibly. If you’re living together with your new Insta boyfriend, you may not want to hand him a list of your private keys, apparently. If you are married and have shared accounts anyways, things may look different. If we are talking thousands of dollars here, storing the keys and with a trusted professional party or at a bank vault released to your heirs only after your will is read may be an option.

3. Write a manual on how to cash out.
   Seriously, WRITE it down. PRINT it out. Tell them where it is. It took me 12 pages to describe to a total newbie how to convert Splinterlands cards to DEC, to SWAP.HIVE, to HIVE, to USDT and then to EUR. Don’t even assume they could memorize that by showing them once between dinner and Netflix.

4. Keep it up to date.
   If you had written that manual 3 years ago, would it include your BSC coins locked up in DeFi liquidity pools? Of course not. Make sure to keep that manual up to date or you might cause some disappointed looks on your heirs’ faces.

But I still have time…

You sure about that? There’s already so much money locked away forever in inaccessible wallets. The internet is full with questions of relatives, assuming their deceased owned Bitcoin and asking if it was possible to recover them. Results date back to 2013 and earlier but also include this 2019s story of a CEO with 145 USD - will be a lot more today - worth of their exchange’s crypto locked in a wallet only he had access to.

Coinbase even included ‘How do I gain access to a deceased family members Coinbase account?’ in their FAQ and 89% of holders are reportedly worried about what would happen to their crypto after their death.

Are you sure you still have that much time?

Disclaimer: No financial advice included in this article. Just sharing my personal experience. Do your own research!

Some links in the article might be referral links, feel free to use other sign-up methods.

Images courtesy of Unsplash.com / screenshots taken myself.

This is a re-published version from my account on the HIVE blockchain.