Don’t Let Your Passwords Be TOO Secure

A client of mine was in a terrible auto accident the other day. He is paralyzed from the neck down and cannot speak. He is going to be discharged from the hospital in the next week or so to a nursing facility – likely for the rest of his life.

His wife has no idea what to do financially. She is not at all computer literate and the kids can’t help much. You see, no one knows his passwords. He never shared them. They can’t open his laptop, they can’t access online accounts, they can’t determine what is “out there.”

We’ll probably be able to help sort this whole mess out. But that is what it is: A Mess. It’ll take time. I hate to seem a scold with respect to my unfortunate client, but this mess could have been avoided (well, it could have been avoided if the jerk hadn’t T-boned him).

Make sure other trusted people (I recommend more than one in case something unfortunate happens to that “one”) have access to your passwords. You could take a couple of approaches.

The low-tech approach is simply to write them all down and store them in a secure place. Then make sure your trusted folks know where they are.

Then there is the hi-tech approach. If you are like me, you might have a hundred different passwords (by the way, if you are security conscious, you should never repeat passwords on multiple sites). I use a password manager that works across multiple platforms – my PC, iPad, iPhone. My brand is LastPass. There is a free version, but the Premium version is ridiculously inexpensive – less than $30 a year. There are other brands out there, but I like LastPass’s simplicity.

To log into LastPass you must have a unique password. Make it impossible to guess. I have an approach our IT guys gave me to using an easy to remember password that no one else (including a machine) will ever figure out. No, I’m not going to tell you what it is – if I did you’d correctly think, “this guy is too stupid to be MY lawyer.” Make sure your other Trusted Ones have your password or at least know how to find it. You should plan on changing that master password about every six months.

LastPass will automatically fill logins on various sites if you are logged into LastPass at the time. LastPass will also store other confidential notes and information (such as credit card numbers, Social Security numbers, router access codes, various rewards numbers).

We have updated our planning checklist to address password considerations. Preplanning Checklist 2022.

Of course, if you are into any hanky-panky this all may be an exceptionally dumb idea. But I lead a boring life, I guess. On the other hand, you should plan to avoid the “excitement” of a catastrophic event rendering you fully incapacitated (or dead) with no one having access to necessary information.