digital estate

How to Leave a List of Your Accounts and Subscriptions for Your Family

By The HeirLoft Team · June 16, 2026

Most guides about a person's digital accounts are written for the people left behind — the ones who have to find a deceased person's subscriptions and cancel them one platform at a time. This one is the opposite. It's for you, while you're still here, so the people you love never have to do that hunt in the first place.

The fix is simple to describe and easy to put off: leave them a clear, current list of your accounts and what they're for. Here's what belongs on it, how to keep it from going stale, and where to keep it.

Why your family needs this list

When there's no list, the people closest to you inherit a guessing game. They don't know which bank you used, which email address resets everything else, or which of the dozens of monthly charges on your statement still matter. The result is months of detective work at the worst possible time — and real losses along the way:

Subscriptions keep billing. Nothing cancels automatically. Charges continue until someone finds each one and stops it.
Accounts get locked out for good. Without the login or recovery details, photos, documents, and email archives can become permanently unreachable.
Things fall through the cracks. A domain lapses, a crypto wallet is never found, a loyalty balance evaporates — because no one knew it existed.

A simple list turns all of that from an archaeological dig into a checklist. It doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to exist.

What belongs on the list

Think in categories. You don't need passwords on the list itself (more on that below) — you need a map of what exists and where.

Financial accounts — banks, brokerages, retirement accounts, credit cards, PayPal/Venmo and the like.
Email — list this first and clearly. The primary inbox is the master key: it resets the password on almost everything else, so whoever helps wind things down needs to know which address it is.
Recurring subscriptions — streaming, software, news, memberships, cloud storage, app-store subscriptions. This is the category people most often miss; it has its own section below.
Social and photos — the accounts that hold years of memories, and any that should be memorialized or closed.
Domains and crypto — call these out explicitly. If you hold domain names or crypto, they're easy for family to overlook entirely and hard to recover without specifics: registrars and renewal dates for domains; where wallets and exchanges live for crypto. These are exactly the assets that quietly disappear when they aren't written down.
Utilities and recurring bills — phone, internet, insurance, anything on autopay.
Where the password manager lives — if you use one, the single most useful pointer you can leave is which password manager it is and how a trusted person is meant to reach it. You're not writing out passwords; you're saying where the keys are kept.

This list organizes information — it is not a will and carries no legal authority on its own. For the legal documents and how this fits with your estate, talk to an estate-planning attorney; if you're helping with someone else's finances, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's Managing Someone Else's Money guides are a reputable place to start. Nothing here is legal or financial advice.

The category everyone forgets: recurring subscriptions

Of everything on the list, recurring subscriptions are the most overlooked and the most tedious for family to untangle — and they're the easiest place to start, because you can often see them all in one pass.

There are two reasons they matter. First, they're a quiet money leak now: most people are paying for more than they remember — trials that converted, services they stopped using, annual renewals that hit once a year and vanish from memory. Second, they're a burden later: every forgotten charge is one your family has to discover, identify, and cancel, often after a third-party billing trail that isn't obvious.

If it's the money side you want to tackle first, here's a closer look at the subscriptions you forgot you're paying for.

You can't write down what you've forgotten you're paying for. The most reliable way to capture the whole category is to let it surface from the place it already lives — your email. HeirLoft's Subscription Autopsy scans your inbox and surfaces the recurring charges automatically, so you can see the full picture, decide for yourself what to keep, and have the list built without typing it out.

See what the Subscription Autopsy finds in your email

To be clear: this is about seeing your subscriptions so you can decide — not a recommendation to cancel anything in particular. That call is yours.

Keeping it current without it becoming a chore

Here's the catch with any list you build by hand: it's accurate the day you finish it and slowly wrong after that. You open a new account, drop an old service, switch banks — and the document quietly drifts out of date. A stale list can be almost as confusing for family as no list at all.

That's the real argument for letting the list build from your email rather than your memory. Receipts and renewal notices keep arriving as your accounts change, so a system that reads from them stays closer to reality than anything you'd maintain by hand. If you do keep a manual list, set a recurring reminder — once or twice a year — to walk through it and reconcile it against your latest statements and inbox.

Where to keep it safe

A list like this is useful only if the right person can reach it at the right time — and no one else, before then. A couple of principles:

Not a plain document emailed around. A spreadsheet sitting in an inbox or a shared drive is both easy to lose and easy to expose.
Not buried inside a will. Wills can be slow to access and aren't built to hold living, frequently-changing details like account lists.
A secure, organized place you control — where you decide who can see it and when, and where it's protected rather than floating around in plain text.

That's the gap HeirLoft is built to fill: it keeps your accounts, subscriptions, domains and crypto in one organized place, and lets you designate who should be able to reach it. You do it once, for yourself; your family gets a clear, current picture exactly when they need it — instead of a year of statements and guesswork.

Start your list — see what's already in your email

If you're reading this because you're already on the other side of it — sorting out someone else's accounts — start with how to find a deceased person's subscriptions, how to cancel them, and the full digital estate checklist for executors. And then, when you're ready, leave your own list — so no one has to do this for you.