Getting information to survivors at the right time

A person’s survivors (heirs, beneficiaries, individuals with survivorship rights, etc.) need to know about their about their rights.  However, many people to not want to entrust all of this personal information to these people “too early,” that is, while they are alive.  On the other hand, it is important that these people do receive the information when the time is right, and not “too late.”

iGoodbye attempts to solve this problem.  Here is an excerpt from their website:

Many of us have information about assets, financial accounts, and personal data that we would like to see passed on privately to ours heirs that we may be hesitant to share before we have actually departed this world.

iGoodbye.com is a simple, easy to use and inexpensive service that holds your electronic documents in trust during your lifetime. Documents are released to the recipients you specify only after we verify that you have passed away.

Typically clients store copies of wills, trusts, account passwords or special instructions to heirs. Clients can leave a message, a recorded message or video, a list of instructions or details about their assets to heirs after their death, without having to give out this information before that time.

In this day and age of computer passwords and account numbers, knowledge is power, and many of us are hesitant to prematurely give this type of information even to trusted loved ones. iGoodbye.com distributes the information you designate to recipients only after we have verified a death certificate with the local authorities.

We provide a military grade encryption tool on our website that is very easy to use. Even better, do your own encryption. We show you how.

When an heir contacts us seeking their documents, we request a death certificate and verify its authenticity by directly contacting local authorities. In addition we request proper ID to verify that the person contacting us is in fact your intended recipient.

For a brief review of this service, see Robert Ambrogi, Super-Powered Web Sites Hit the Jackpot, Law.com, May 19, 2008.

Special thanks to Benson Varghese (J.D. Candidate, Texas Tech University School of Law) for bringing this website to my attention.