Your Spouse Handled All the Computer Stuff. Now You Do.

Search for help with this and you will find the same article about thirty times. How to get into a deceased person's computer. How to reset the password on his laptop. How to ask Apple or Google or Microsoft for access. All of it is about one locked door, and all of it assumes that once the door is open the problem is solved.

It is not, and the people who ring us know it is not. The call we get is rarely "I cannot get into his laptop." It is some version of this: I have opened the laptop, or my son opened it for me, and now I am looking at it and I have no idea what any of this is. I do not know who the internet is with. I do not know what half these emails are renewing. The alarm company keeps calling and the account is in his name. The printer only works from his computer. I have never in my life paid a bill on a screen and now apparently I pay all of them that way.

That is a different problem from the locked door, and it is the one that actually determines how the next year goes. This article is about that problem. If you are still on the wrong side of the door — the machine is encrypted, the accounts are locked, you need to know what the platforms will and will not do and what the law in California says about it — that is a separate piece and it is linked at the bottom. Start there, come back here.

One more thing before we start, because it changes the tone of everything that follows. None of this is a reflection on you. Households divide labour, and in a great many of the homes we work in — and we do a lot of this work in the desert cities, where the median age is higher and the houses are fuller of technology than anyone planned — one person ended up owning the passwords for the same undramatic reason one person ended up owning the car maintenance. It was not a decision. It just settled that way over thirty years. You are not behind. You are inheriting a system that was built for an audience of one, and it was never documented because it never needed to be.

The mailbox is the last thing you close, not the first

Almost everyone gets this backwards, and it is the single most expensive mistake available in the first month. The instinct — a kind and tidy instinct — is to start shutting things down. Close the email account. It only gets junk now, and seeing his name in the inbox hurts.

Do not close it. Not yet. That mailbox is not a mailbox, it is the master key to the house.

Here is why. Every online account in the world is secured by the same underlying promise: if you forget the password, we will email you a link to set a new one. Which means whoever can read that inbox can eventually get into almost everything registered to it. If your husband set up the internet account, the electric account, the water bill, the alarm monitoring, the car loan, the insurance portal, the pharmacy, the airline miles and the bank alerts — and he almost certainly did, because he was the one who did the computer stuff — then every one of those has a password-reset path that ends in that inbox.

Close the mailbox and you do not just lose the email. You lose the reset path to dozens of accounts you have not discovered yet, and you lose it before you have discovered them. People find out months later, in the worst possible way: something needs changing, the company says "we have sent a verification link to the email on file," and the email on file no longer exists.

So the order is: keep the mailbox alive and reachable, do the inventory, move each account onto your own email one at a time, and only then think about closing anything. That may take months. That is fine. There is no prize for closing accounts quickly, and a dormant mailbox costs nothing to leave sitting there.

Two practical cautions. First, "reachable" means you can actually open it — on a device you control, with the password or recovery method to hand, not just "it is still open on his iPad in the study, do not let the iPad die." Write the password down on paper and put the paper somewhere real. Second, the big platforms do eventually act on accounts nobody signs into, and there are published clocks and published processes for a deceased account holder. Those clocks and those processes are covered in detail in the companion article linked below. The short version for today: signing in occasionally is not nothing, and there is no rush to make that inbox disappear.

You do not need his passwords to find out what he was running

The thing that makes this feel impossible is that it seems to be a chicken-and-egg problem. You cannot take over the accounts until you know what they are, and you cannot find out what they are because they are all behind passwords you do not have.

That is not actually true. There are four lists sitting in plain sight that will name the accounts without revealing a single password, and between them they catch nearly everything. Get a notebook — paper, genuinely, not a document on the computer you are still learning to use — and work through all four before you change anything.

The first list is the saved-password list in whichever browser he used, and the important thing to understand is that you are not there for the passwords. You are there for the list of website names. If he used Chrome, that list lives at passwords.google.com and also inside Chrome itself — the three-dot menu at the top right, then Passwords and autofill, then Google Password Manager. It is a plain alphabetical list of every site the browser ever offered to remember, and reading it is like reading somebody's filing cabinet labels. Utilities you did not know you had. A storage unit. Two airlines. Something called a patient portal. You do not need to open any of them today; you just need them in the notebook.

The second list is the same page's quietest section, and it is the one nobody thinks to look at. Google Password Manager keeps a separate list of "Declined sites and apps" — the places where he specifically told the browser not to save the password. Think about which sites a careful person declines on. It is the bank. It is the brokerage. It is the one with the money in it. The list still names the site even though it never kept the password, which makes it, for our purposes, the most valuable list on the machine.

The third list is the mailbox itself, used as a search engine rather than as an inbox. Open the email and search for the words that only ever appear in one kind of message: "receipt", "your subscription", "renews", "payment received", "welcome to", "confirm your account". Every hit names a company he had a relationship with. This catches a whole category the browser never saw, because plenty of things get set up once on a phone and never touched again.

The fourth list is the one that is not on a computer at all, and it is the most honest of the four: twelve months of bank and credit-card statements. Every recurring charge is a service somebody is still providing to this house, and a statement cannot forget, cannot be declined, and does not require a password. Statements are how people find the subscription that renews every October, the backup service nobody knew was running, and the second phone line. If you only do one of these four, do this one.

Cross-check the four against each other and you will have, in an afternoon or two, a genuinely complete picture of what this household is running. That picture is the whole job. Everything after it is just paperwork.

The logins that have no password at all

Now the part that no other page on this subject seems to cover, and the part that we have watched cause real, permanent losses.

Some of his accounts do not have a password. Not a forgotten one — none at all, by design. If he ever signed up for something by clicking the "Sign in with Google" or "Sign in with Apple" button rather than typing out a new email and password, then that account has no password of its own. It borrows its identity from his Google or Apple account. The lock is not on that door; the lock is somewhere else entirely.

You will never find these in a password list, because there is no password to save. They will not show up in the browser. They may not even show up in a statement, if they are free. And they are everywhere: shopping sites, streaming, food delivery, loyalty schemes, the app for the garage door, the app for the hearing aids, forums, photo services.

There are two places to look, and both are free and take about a minute. On the Google side, the list is in his Google Account under the linked-apps page at myaccount.google.com/linkedapps, which has a "Sign in with Google" section listing every app and site linked that way. On the Apple side, Apple keeps the equivalent list in the Apple Account settings: on an iPhone or iPad, open Settings, tap his name at the top, then tap Sign in with Apple; on a Mac, Apple menu, System Settings, his name, then Sign in with Apple; or on the web at account.apple.com under Sign-In & Security, then Sign in with Apple. Apple's own support page describes that list as showing the apps you are currently using with Sign in with Apple, and lets you select any of them to see what was shared.

Here is why this matters more than it sounds, and this is Google describing its own behaviour rather than us speculating. Google's support documentation on linked apps states that if your Google Account is deleted, "your Sign in with Google data is also deleted, which includes your sign-in credentials for the linked app," and consequently that "you can no longer use the Sign in with Google button to sign in with the deleted account." The account at the other end is not necessarily gone — Google's advice is to "try to sign in to the app with a username and password, or contact the developer directly," and notes you can also try to create new sign-in credentials with the app — but the key you used to open it is.

So the sequence matters enormously. While his Google or Apple account still works, go through that linked list and, for each one that is worth keeping, sign in the old way and set a real email address and a real password on it — usually somewhere in the account settings under "add a password" or "change email." That converts a borrowed key into one you own. Do it in the wrong order — close the Google account first, then discover the account underneath it — and you are reduced to writing to a company's support desk and hoping.

The Apple side has a second wrinkle worth knowing about. Apple offers a Hide My Email option alongside Sign in with Apple, which invents a unique random address ending in @privaterelay.appleid.com for each site and forwards the mail on. Apple's documentation is explicit that those relayed messages are forwarded to the verified email address on the Apple Account, and that only the app or website the address was created for can use it. Read that twice in the context you are in. If a shop has a relay address on file rather than a real one, then that shop's password-reset email goes to an address that only exists as long as his Apple Account does, and forwards to a mailbox chosen inside that same account. Untangle those while everything still works.

Stop living inside his accounts

This is the trap, and it is a comfortable one, which is exactly why so many people are still in it two years later.

Once you have access to his email and his computer login, everything works. You can pay the bills. You can see the bank. It is easier than changing anything, and changing things is exhausting right now, and so the household quietly continues to be operated by a person who is no longer alive. The laptop still says his name at the sign-in screen. The bills still come addressed to him. You have effectively become a long-term guest in his digital house.

It works right up until it does not, and it tends to stop working at the worst moment — a device gets replaced and asks for a verification code sent to a phone that was disconnected months ago, a bank flags the activity, a company asks for identification that will not match, an account gets caught by an inactivity policy. And each of those is far harder to solve in a panic on a Tuesday than it would have been to solve deliberately in month two.

So the target to work toward, slowly, is that every essential thing this house needs is in your name, reachable from your email, and secured by something you hold. Essential means: the internet account, the electricity and water, the phone, the alarm monitoring, the insurance, anything on autopay, and the accounts for the devices you personally use every day.

The good news is that most of these are not technology problems at all. Utilities, internet providers and alarm companies deal with this constantly and all of them have a documented process for transferring an account after a death — usually a phone call, a copy of the death certificate, and a new account in your name. It is tedious and it involves hold music, but it is not difficult, and it is much better done by a phone call than by trying to keep logging in as him. Ask each one specifically whether it is a transfer or a new account, because the answer changes whether equipment, phone numbers and service dates carry over.

One genuinely technical item belongs in this list. The computer itself is usually signed in to a Microsoft account or an Apple account that was his. It is generally much cleaner to set up a new user account on that machine in your own name, signed in to your own email, and move your files into it, than to keep using his profile forever. That way the machine belongs to you, its backups belong to you, and the day it asks for a password reset the email goes somewhere you control. We do this for people regularly and it is usually a single visit.

The house is full of things that answer to one person

Then there is the hardware, and this is where a modern house is genuinely different from the one this situation used to involve thirty years ago.

Go around and make a list of everything in the building that has an app: the alarm panel, the doorbell, the cameras, the thermostat, the garage opener, the smart locks, the robot vacuum, the sprinklers, the solar monitoring, the TV, the speakers. In most houses, every one of those is bound to a single account — his — and in most systems that ownership is not really shareable. You can usually be added as a member or a shared user, which lets you press the buttons, but membership is not ownership. Owners can transfer the device, remove users, change the billing and close the account. Members frequently cannot, and in some systems removing the owner takes the devices with them.

The practical rule is the same as the last section, and it has the same deadline: transfer ownership while the original account still works. Nearly every platform has a documented way to hand a device to a new owner, and nearly every platform makes it painful or impossible once the original account is gone. We have written separately about the ownership asymmetries in shared Apple, Google and smart-home setups — that article was written for couples separating, but the mechanics are identical here, and it is linked below.

A few specific ones come up in nearly every one of these visits. The alarm: monitoring is a contract as well as an app, and the monitoring company needs to know who you are, what your verbal password is, and who is on the call list — because the call list very possibly still has his name at the top of it. The cameras: find out where the footage actually goes, because it is quite often a subscription in his name, or a hard drive in the garage, or a memory card that filled up in 2023. The printer: it is extremely common for the printer to have been set up on one laptop rather than on the network, which is why it works for him and for nobody else, and this is a twenty-minute fix. And the Wi-Fi password, which in a surprising number of houses exists nowhere except in his head and on a router sticker that was replaced years ago.

One page, on paper, in your own handwriting

When the inventory is done, condense it. Not into a document on the computer — onto one piece of paper, which goes somewhere you will find it, and ideally a photocopy of which goes to the person you would call in an emergency.

What belongs on it is short. The Wi-Fi network name and its password. Who the internet service is with, the account number, and the support phone number. Who the alarm is with, the account number, and the verbal password. Your email address and the phone number attached to it for verification codes. Where the backup is and how you would know if it stopped. And the name and number of whoever you call when something breaks.

That is the entire operating manual for a modern household, and it fits on a postcard. The reason it is worth doing on paper is that every item on it is something you will need at precisely the moment the technology is not available to tell you — the internet is down, or the phone is dead, or the alarm is going off at two in the morning and the panel wants a code.

While you are at it, this is the natural moment to sort out the password problem for the future rather than reconstruct the past. One password manager, holding your accounts, with one long password you actually know and a printed recovery sheet in the safe. It is a better answer than a notebook and an enormously better answer than the same password on forty sites, and it is a small enough job that it fits inside one visit.

The help that turns up on its own is the help to refuse

We have to say this part plainly, because we get called afterwards more often than before.

This period is one of the most heavily targeted situations in consumer fraud, for a reason that has nothing to do with technology: the information is public. Obituaries name the deceased, the town, the surviving spouse and often the children. Property records are public. From that, a caller can know enough about you to sound like somebody who belongs in your life.

The shape it takes is almost always the same, and it is not a threat — it is an offer of help. Someone rings about an unpaid bill he left behind. Someone from "the bank's fraud department" calls about suspicious activity on his account and needs you to confirm things. A pop-up on the computer says it is infected and gives a number. A pleasant person offers to come and consolidate all the accounts and sort out the passwords for you. A relative-of-a-friend who is good with computers offers to take the laptop home for a week.

The house rule, and it is the only one you need to remember, is about direction. You call them; they do not call you. Nobody gets remote access to your computer, or a password, or a code from a text message, unless you initiated the contact by dialling a number you already had — off a paper statement, off the back of your card, off the sheet from the previous section. If somebody calls you and the thing they want is access, the answer is no regardless of how plausible they are and regardless of what they already know about your family. Knowing things about your family is the cheapest part of the whole operation.

This applies to well-meaning people as well as to criminals, which is the uncomfortable half. Letting a helpful acquaintance set everything up under their own email address is a real and recurring problem: it feels like generosity and it produces a household whose alarm, cameras and internet account are registered to somebody else. If someone is helping, everything must end up in your name and your email.

You are allowed to make it simpler than he had it

The last thing, and in our experience the thing that changes how people feel about all of it.

You do not have to inherit the setup. It was built by one person, over years, to suit how that person worked, and it very likely accumulated complications that made sense to him and serve no purpose for you. There is no obligation to keep a system running just because it exists.

It is entirely reasonable to decide that the desktop in the den goes, and one laptop stays. That three streaming subscriptions become one. That the network-attached drive nobody understands is copied off and retired in favour of a backup that simply runs by itself. That the printer moves to where you actually sit. That the two-hundred-channel remote gets replaced with the one that has six buttons. Simpler is not a downgrade. Simpler is the setup surviving contact with the person who has to use it.

And it is fine for the goal to be modest. The goal is not to become the person who did the computer stuff. The goal is that the bills get paid, the photographs are safe, the front door camera works, and nothing important is sitting on one machine with no copy anywhere. That is four things, and all four are achievable in a couple of sessions.

What we can do, and what we will not do

What we do on these visits, and we do a lot of them: sit at the kitchen table and go through the four lists with you. Set the computer up as yours rather than his. Get the printer onto the network so it works from anything. Find the Wi-Fi password and write it down. Get a backup running that does not require anybody to remember it. Move devices onto your account while that is still possible. Show you, without hurrying, how to do the three or four things you will now be doing every week. And write the one-page sheet.

What we will not do: break into an account, bypass a login for you, or advise you on anything legal. If a machine is locked or an account needs a platform's formal bereavement process, there are proper channels for that and they are covered in the companion article below. If the question is about a will, an estate, probate or who is entitled to what, that is a solicitor's question and we will say so rather than guess.

If you are somewhere between Pasadena and Palm Springs and this is the situation you are in, call or send us a note. Bring the notebook. There is no such thing as a question that is too basic on this kind of visit — we have never once thought less of anyone for asking what a browser is, and the people who ask it are usually the ones running the house competently three months later.