Eva (52) thought her husband had everything perfectly sorted. He left her one password for all accounts. Handy, she thought. Until she discovered that golden key was more of a maze entry.
‘Darling, if anything ever happens to me, you’ll only need this.’ Jeroen placed a slip of paper in the safe, with one lengthy password on it. The master password for his password manager. ‘Everything is in here,’ he said. From Netflix to the bank. From the health insurance to the tax office.
And to be honest: I was relieved. Jeroen had always been the tech guy of the two of us. He could think of three new passwords while I was still trying to find the remote. So, him having sorted this? Totally his style.
When he passed away last year, the blow was hard. But somehow, that little piece of paper gave me peace. At least there was something that was organized.
After the funeral, I opened his laptop, typed in the password and... sure enough, there was a list of almost 300 accounts. From the bank to Spotify, from the tax office to obscure tech sites. I thought: this is manageable. Just work through it and it’s done.
The bank seemed like a logical first step. I copied the username and password. Logged in. This was going well, I thought. Until a screen popped up: ‘Enter the code from your 2FA Authenticator.’
2FA? I had no clue what that was. After some googling, I found out these are extra security codes generated by an app on his phone. But which app that was, I didn’t know. That one tiny detail he had forgotten: you need more than just a password.
I tried the health insurance. Again that code. The credit card. Same story. The twenty most important accounts were all extra secured. And that’s fine when you’re alive, but downright annoying when you’re a widow trying to log in.
The other accounts were another story. There were things I had never heard of: Cloudflare, DigitalOcean, Namecheap. Did I need to do something with these? Were we paying for them? Or was it a forgotten hobby project from 2009? It felt like being handed a bunch of keys, with nobody telling me where the doors were.
After staring at that list for weeks, I realized: Jeroen had meant well, but it was half a job. I had the passwords, but not the story behind them.
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A password manager is an essential tool for digital safety, but it’s not a legacy plan. Without the right context and access to two-factor authentication (2FA), you leave your loved ones with an unsolvable puzzle. A service like Veault is the perfect addition. It not only helps you store passwords but also records the necessary context, instructions, and recovery codes. That way, you leave behind a clear, usable guide, not just a data dump.
