I have now reached the age at which my father wrote his first will. He died about 8 years later. I was about the same age as Joshua is now.
His will was about a page long. My dad’s friend was the witness. It talked about who would get what when he died. It was pretty straight forward but not very interesting other than the fact that it was a will. After he died, we have been sharing the wealth amicably. There was no need for any disputes because we all had enough and when ever we needed something, we shared things fairly and without quibbling. So the will was not really ever interesting. But there was one very interesting wish in his will. And that I will never forget. Because we implemented that as well. At very short notice too.
The one thing that caught my innocent little eye was his one wish which stood out from all the rest. He wanted to be buried within 5 kilometers of where he died. I never forgot that. When he died I remembered that. Of course, by then he had probably created another will. But I did not go looking for it. The day after he died was a ‘bandh’ (or ‘hartal’). So it was all the more convenient to bury him nearby.
I don’t know what was top of his mind when he wrote the will. It certainly was not passwords. All the bank accounts were in joint accounts or in trust accounts. So the money was easy to get at. Others could not take it. All the property documents were at home in a cabinet. They were all organized in files and the files were labelled. My main concern today is how to pass on my passwords. Because there are a lot of important assets that I want my children to benefit from. They all require a password to access. And it is not just the passwords. We need to know the url, the user name, etc.
How do other people manage to do this? I am skeptical of using even a paid service to store my passwords. Is there an open source password-box? What if my children lose the password to that? Password management is becoming a big problem for me, and I suppose for many others.
In that context, today I was introduced to facebook’s new Timeline. It looks awesome. They should have called it Life-line. It now allows you to go back in time and post things in the past. It may be interesting for one’s children to look at one’s time line. I’m not sure if it will be interesting to others. If my father had access to facebook, I’m sure he would have chronicled his life in time line for his children. I know this because, he saved news paper clippings from man’s first visit to the moon to show his unborn children. He even wrote letters to us which he shared years later. When I came to the US as a student, he would religiously write to me every week and call me.
As I write this post, I’m thinking that the timeline would be an excellent place to keep passwords and other information you want to share with your loved ones. I’m not sure yet if Timeline will implement the concept of circles like google plus did. If they do, and I can create a circle called passwords and include only my family in it, that would be a good solution. It will stay around after I am gone. It will be searchable (or should be.) Now if only facebook can settle down with their privacy schemes.
If everyone start using a passwords circle, then hopefully FB or google or someone will make it sufficiently secure. I don’t know. Just a thought. Do you have any password storing ideas? Feel free to comment please.
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