Before You Depart:
Preparing For The Unexpected

Today, Collin and I looked through our email accounts and found passwords to our online services, bank statements, financial information, contact information for just about everyone we know, and a whole lot more. When someone passes away, being able to access the email account of the deceased can be a great help to the survivors since important information can be viewed, contacts can be notified, and future emails can be retrieved. Unless you have the login information, obtaining access to an email account of the deceased typically requires death certificates, powers of attorney, and long waiting periods for all the paper work to go through.

For instance, here are the steps necessary to obtain access to a Gmail account of the deceased:

1. Your full name and contact information, including a verifiable email address.
2. The Gmail address of the individual who passed away.
3a. The full header from an email message that you have received at your verifiable email address, from the Gmail account in question. (To obtain the header from a message in Gmail, open the message, click ‘More options,’ then click ‘Show original.’ Copy everything from ‘Delivered- To:’ through the ‘References:’ line. To obtain headers from other webmail or email providers, please refer to http://www.spamcop.com/help_with_headers/)
3b. The entire contents of the message.
4. A copy of the death certificate of the deceased.
5. A copy of the document that gives you Power of Attorney over the Gmail account.
6. If you are the parent of the individual, please send us a copy of the Birth Certificate if the Gmail account owner was under the age of 18. In this case, Power of Attorney is not required.

In order to make the whole process infinitely simpler and quicker for your family if something happens to you, we have a special “Passwords” category built right into all YouDeparted accounts. Just like every other type of entry, your Passwords are encrypted with military-grade 256 bit AES, so you can rest assured they are safely and securely stored in your YouDeparted.com account. Recording your email passwords and designating who should receive them is very easy to do with YouDeparted, and will ensure that your family will not have to deal with complicated paperwork and waiting periods.

We just rolled out a free* “Mini” accounts and 14-day free trials on all premium accounts so now you can try YouDeparted completely risk free. Check out the new accounts here. We also streamlined the sign up process so now you can literally get a YouDeparted account in mere seconds rather than minutes. We hope you like the updates!

Given that we are offering a very unique service, we want to let people take a thorough look first to try it out. With the Mini account, you can store a small number of entries and up to 1MB of space, and specify who will receive your entries if something happens to you. With the premium accounts you can store from 100 to unlimited entries and up to 5GB of pictures, movies, documents, audio, and other files. Our pricing is very competitive with many of the top online storage providers with the added benefit that we are more secure and that your account can be unlocked if something happens to you. With all accounts, you can specify which of your Recipients will receive each piece of information.

Again, we hope the updates come as welcome news, and we always appreciate any feedback or comments!

-The team at YouDeparted.com

*The account is free for 90 days. At any time you can upgrade into our basic account and all your information will be transferred.

When we first came up with the idea to create YouDeparted, we were primarily thinking about how useful it would be when someone passed away. The Angora Fire in South Lake Tahoe serves as a terrifying reminder that getting our lives organized is absolutely necessary for everyone. Beyond preparing for the immediate life or death concern of escaping a natural disaster, we should all think about how we have financially prepared. Right now, the unfortunate citizens in the path of the fire are being evacuated and have just minutes to gather their belongings and flee to safety, but hopefully many of them took steps to prepare for the disaster in advance.

Here are some recommended steps:

1. Keep an accurate record of your personal belongings with photos or videos. These records will help you make claims on items lost in a fire or other disaster. Keep these records in a safe place such as your YouDeparted account and/or safe deposit box.
2. Review your homeowners’ insurance and make sure it covers the full cost of replacing your home.
3. Determine the exact replacement cost for your home, and talk to your agent if it seems too low.
4. Keep copies of important documents.
5. Backup your photo collections.
6. Formulate a disaster plan. Imagine if a disaster happened tomorrow, then think about everything you would have to take care of. Create your plan, get everything you can think of organized and in order, then keep the information in a safe place.

We hope you are never faced with devastating walls of flames like our neighbors across the lake! Remember to be prepared for the unexpected especially if you live in a place prone to a fire, earthquake, flood, tornado, land slide, hurricane, tsunami, or other disaster.

Here is a photo taken from the office at 5:30PM today: