Having been thru this stuff, financial/official orgs have policies for accepting a death certificate by fax or mail. If they know your social security number, there is no need to worry a death cert is the ultimate root password to any account. So don't worry about banks / brokerages /insurance etc. Once your SS # shows up on the SSDI list they don't argue much, and that only takes a day or two, or so it seemed.

Utility/subscription type services pretty much get a copy of the certificate and they go away, maybe with a final billing statement. Look out for scammers sending fake invoices to dead people listed in obituaries or legal notice section of the paper.

Where it gets messier is non-financial institution online accounts, but they wouldn't be financially important or time critical. I remember ebay was fairly civil about the whole thing, although I don't remember what they did.

I have a password file encrypted with key that has been split into five shares using Shamir's Secret Sharing Scheme [1]. I printed out the shares, instructions, and file URL and hand delivered them to five trusted individuals in different states. Any three of the five can reassemble the key.

[1] http://point-at-infinity.org/ssss/

A safety deposit box with the password to the master database?

Sometimes low tech works.

I thought of that, but I don't like it for a few reasons:

1) It's cumbersome to update. I don't want to run to the bank, get the thumbdrive, update it, and take it back every time I change a password.

2) Everyone has to know that I have the box, know where it is, and know where to get the key.

3) The key could get lost or destroyed. For example, if someone slings an especially effective curse at me and I literally die in a (house) fire. You can keep the safe deposit key in a safe... but now you have to store the key for that safe, or the combination.

4) Even if they have the key, the bank still might not let my next-of-kin into the box. The bank keeps a list of who is allowed in and their signatures. You'll have to physically take every person who needs access down to the bank and add them. It's one more chore, particularly because my family lives in other states and rarely comes here to visit (we all go back to the parents' house instead). In theory a death certificate and some other documentation can overcome that, but it's going to be time consuming and annoying, during a time when they don't need one more damn thing. I'm also not sure how access is handled in case of incapacity but not death (ie, coma, sick in a foreign country, kidnapped, whatever).

You only need to keep the master password at bank; you can freely update/distribute the encrypted file.

Some sort of secret sharing scheme [1] seems like it would work well here. You can distribute parts of a key so that any 3 of 5 people (or whatever) can work together to recover the key. Unfortunately I don't know of any practical way to do this without kludging together your own system.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_sharing

I use Keeper to manage my passwords. I use randomly generated hard passwords for all but a few things, so I need it. What isn't random is the password to my laptop, to my phone, and to Keeper. My wife and daughter both know those passwords, just in case.