What to do with a loved one's phone: the 30-day digital checklist
Their phone holds the two-factor codes, the photos and the subscriptions. Here's the order to work in before the battery dies and the accounts lock.
After a death, the phone on the nightstand is quietly the most important object in the house. It receives the verification codes for the bank, the email that every other account resets through, the photos nobody has backed up, and the subscriptions that will keep billing a closed heart. Families who wait a month often find it locked, wiped by a security policy, or disconnected by the carrier.
Week one: keep it alive and charged
- Plug it in and keep it on. Don't let the carrier account lapse — pay the next bill even if you plan to cancel later.
- Don't guess the passcode repeatedly. Ten wrong attempts wipe most phones.
- Look for the passcode where the person kept other essentials: a letter of intent, a password manager emergency kit, a note in the safe.
- If you're the executor, get certified copies of the death certificate now; Apple, Google and carriers will ask for one.
Week two: the email account comes first
Almost every other account resets through email. Once you can read it, you can recover the rest in order of importance. Apple's Digital Legacy and Google's Inactive Account Manager both exist for this — if the person set them up, the process is a form and a certificate. If not, both companies have court-order and executor paths; they take longer but they work.
- Bank and brokerage — notify, freeze cards, ask about the estate account process.
- Insurance and pensions — start claims; they run on their own clocks.
- Utilities and phone — move to a survivor's name or schedule the shutoff.
- Streaming, cloud storage, apps — cancel from the App Store and Play Store subscription pages, which catch most of them in one place.
Weeks three and four: photos, memorials and shutting the door
Back up the photos before anything else changes — a laptop and a hard drive is fine. Decide what happens to social accounts: Facebook and Instagram can be memorialised so nobody logs in but the profile remains; most other networks can simply be deleted. Finally, file a deceased-do-not-contact request with the credit bureaus so the person's identity can't be reused, a step the FTC recommends within the first month.
If you're reading this before you need it: write down the phone passcode and where your email recovers to, and put that note where your family will look first.
Create your vault- What to do when a loved one dies: protecting their identity · FTC Consumer Advice
Facts and figures in this note come from the sources above; the prose is HearthVault's own. Links open the original.
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General information about personal records and planning, not legal, tax or financial advice. Laws vary by state; talk to a licensed professional about your situation.
