The plan for the years when you are here but cannot manage
Death is not the only event that locks a family out. Dementia, a stroke, a long hospitalization: someone has to pay the mortgage and read the medical portal, and it should never be one person deciding alone that the time has come.
Incapacity is the harder problem
When someone dies, the law eventually opens doors through probate. When someone is alive but fading, the accounts stay legally theirs and practically frozen, while bills arrive anyway. Families improvise: a child guesses passwords, money moves informally, and resentment or worse follows. The improvisation is the danger, and it happens because no plan was made while it still could be.
The setup: distribute five, require three
The parent puts the essentials, banking, the password manager, insurance and medical portals, behind one secret and splits it.
- check_circlePieces 1, 2, 3: each adult child holds one. Equal standing, no favorites, and no child able to act alone.
- check_circlePiece 4: the family attorney, sealed alongside the power of attorney and healthcare directive.
- check_circlePiece 5: printed in the home safe, available to the parent themselves and, eventually, to whoever is lawfully in the house helping.
The arithmetic of family trust
All three children together: recovery. Two children plus the attorney: recovery, even if one sibling is estranged or overseas. One child alone, even with the home safe: two pieces, one short. The design assumes love and plans for friction, which is what a good plan does.
Agree on the trigger in advance
Write down, with the attorney, what justifies bringing pieces together: a physician’s letter, a hospitalization beyond some length, or the parent’s own request. The children sign it. When the moment comes, nobody is debating ethics in a hospital hallway; they are following instructions their parent wrote.
While capacity remains, rehearse
Do one supervised practice run with everyone present: bring three pieces together in the HeirLock app, watch the secret come back, then change nothing and go to dinner. The children learn the mechanics, the parent sees the safeguards hold, and the plan stops being abstract. Pair this page with emergency access for why a single designated contact is not enough.
Incapacity planning questions
How is this different from giving one child power of attorney?
Power of attorney grants legal authority; it does not hand over passwords, and it concentrates everything in one person. This setup provides the access half and spreads it, so stepping in requires agreement. Many families use both: a power of attorney for the law, pieces for the logins, ideally naming the same trigger.
Doesn't requiring three pieces slow things down in an emergency?
By a day at most, and that day is the safeguard. Any two children plus the attorney, or all three children, can act. What cannot happen is one child quietly taking over the accounts during a confusing season when the parent cannot object.
What if my children do not get along?
Then this design matters more, not less. No child can act alone, and no child can be cut out by the others without the attorney noticing. The recovery rule forces exactly the cooperation a divided family otherwise avoids until it is too late.
Can the setup be changed after a diagnosis?
Yes, while capacity remains, and that is the reason to act early. Splitting again takes minutes in the app. After capacity is lost, the existing pieces are the plan, which is why the time to create them is now.
Decide now, while it is still your decision
Give your children a way to help with bills and accounts, while making sure they have to act together.
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