You can't suck at passwords
Here's how to spring clean your digital life as a couple.
Heather is brilliant in one million ways, but managing passwords wasn’t one of them.
For as long as I could remember, I watched her navigate a hodgepodge of credentials scattered across her memory, saved in Google Chrome, stored in different password managers, and logged digitally behind fingerprint passkeys. Inevitably, her password chaos became my password chaos. Any time we needed to pull up an account together, we’d start arguing as she fumbled to guess it or reset it at the most inopportune time.
Yeah, I wasn’t the most patient, but this had become a pattern over the years. This small, recurring friction had gone from a little thing to a bigger thing.
Most couples don’t think about passwords until they have to. For Heather, this was probably the last remaining area of her financial life she was dissociating from. She’s on top of our calendars. She manages the household inventory. She’s dialed into our quarterly money meetings. But she worried that she was just too far gone with the password thing to come back from it.
Not too long ago, we sat down together and finally did something about it. We took every stored password living in the browsers, notes apps, and deep recesses of Heather’s brain, and moved them all into one master password manager.
For what it’s worth, I had been using LastPass for years before switching to Apple Passwords. The export was easier than I expected. Heather is now using it too, and most importantly, I have access if something ever happens to her, and she has access if something ever happens to me.
Digital access is the new financial transparency.
We spend a lot of time in this newsletter and our book talking about bringing both partners to the table, and making sure neither person is in the dark about the money. But your financial life doesn’t just live in spreadsheets anymore. It lives behind all those passwords: your bank; your investment accounts; your insurance portal; your FSA; your kids’ tuition payments; even your estate documents. All of it is locked behind credentials that, in many households, only one person typically knows.
Having one partner manage the important passwords isn’t a good way to divide labor. It’s actually making you vulnerable. Think about what it really means when one partner can’t access the accounts. Not just in a worst-case scenario (yes, that too) but in everyday moments. What happens when your spouse is traveling and forgot to set the bills? Or you have a medical emergency? Or a basement toilet explodes sewage all over your carpet at 6pm on a Sunday and you need the homeowner’s insurance policy number right now (ugh, IYKYK)? The moment you need access is sometimes inconvenient, it’s sometimes an emergency, and it’s almost never the moment you want to be figuring this out.
A while back, I introduced readers to my death note1 simple document that covers everything Heather would need if I died. Things like: names and contact info for our estate attorney; accountant; key business contacts; instructions for my online accounts and digital presence; where to find the physical documents, spare keys, and anything else she shouldn’t have to hunt for in the worst moment of her life. In response, so many of you told us it helped you recognize the gaps in your own lives. The death note and the password manager are really two parts of the same idea: your partner shouldn’t be locked out of your life.
This is also why “Passwords” earned its place as one of the four Ps in a solid estate planning framework, right alongside People, Property, and Preferences. It belongs in the same conversation as your will and your healthcare proxy, because even though it won’t replace your formal estate planning documents, continuity in difficult moments is just so important.
Let me help you get it together.
Start by picking a password manager that could work for your whole household. If you’re in the Apple ecosystem, Passwords is already built into your iPhone, iPad, and Mac and syncs across all your devices through iCloud. If you’ve been using LastPass or another manager, both offer a straightforward CSV export that Apple Passwords can import. It took us one sitting. If you’re not on Apple devices, 1Password and Bitwarden have great reputations and are widely used options available on any platform. The core features are generally the same across all of them: your logins live in one secure place, strong unique passwords get generated for every account, and you can share access with your partner or set up emergency access for someone you trust.
How you share access depends on the platform you choose. Understand the difference in these options. Apple Passwords lets you create shared groups, so your partner has live, ongoing access to the logins you choose to share with no waiting period. Apple also offers a Legacy Contact feature through your Apple ID, which allows a designated person to access your entire account after you pass away. Bitwarden has a dedicated emergency access feature where you designate a trusted person, set a waiting period of 24 or 48 hours, and if you don’t deny their request in that window, they get in. 1Password works differently. Their approach is an Emergency Kit, a PDF document containing your credentials that you print out and store somewhere safe, like with your will or in a safe deposit box, so a trusted person can access it when needed. While each platform has its own method, the goal is the same: your partner will not need to depend on your presence to gain access in an emergency. Know how your platform handles it, and make sure you’ve set it up.
Beyond your password manager, build out your own master document, like our death note. Store it somewhere safe that your partner can locate it. If your partner doesn’t handle certain bills or household tasks, include those, too. Don’t assume they know. Update it once a year and after any major life event. Think of it less as a morbid exercise and more as the most useful thing you can do for the person you love.
You can make all of this part of your spring cleaning efforts this year. Block an hour, sit down together, and work through it. Pick your manager, migrate your passwords, set up shared access, and run through the master document together. An hour or two of work now can save you an enormous amount of time and energy later.
We struggled with Heather’s password situation for a long time, but the reality was a precarious gap in how prepared we were. Closing that gap wasn’t even a big deal. We just spent one afternoon with a piece of software, and that was it. And most of the time, this is what being a financial team looks like. It’s not some elaborate strategy but in the unglamorous work of making sure neither of you is in the dark.
We’d love to hear from you. What’s an area of friction in your relationship that you finally resolved?
We Reddit Online
I get the appeal of wanting to wipe out the car loan to create more monthly breathing room. Layoffs have this way of making our financial decisions feel like they need to be made in the name of security alone, and going from $400 to $950 of wiggle room would feel really good in a moment like this. But this couple can’t ignore what they’re giving up for that momentary feeling of safety.
The $11K isn’t just sitting there. It’s this person’s buffer while their partner looks for work. This cash keeps an unexpected expense from turning into credit card debt and gives them options if the job search takes longer than expected. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. So, the question isn’t just “Does this improve our monthly cash flow?” It’s “Does this make us more fragile overall?”
In most cases like this, I’d rather see them preserve the cash and keep the optionality, especially if the car loan interest rate is reasonable. But it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. They could explore a middle ground by making a partial payment to lower the monthly obligation without draining their savings completely while they wait for the unemployment benefits to come through.
-Douglas
We’re in the news
It’s not everyday you get to help kick off a brand new show on CNBC. Last week, I joined my friends Dan Ives and Ryan Detrick for Morning Call’s first episode ever! Congrats to Morgan Brennan on the launch.
Also for CNBC, I shared my thoughts on why people expect money conversations with their partner to go worse than they actually do.
And finally, Heather and I are thrilled to share an interview we did with TLDR, Canada’s most-read financial newsletter, about this newsletter, our book, and our five rules for doing money better…together.
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The content shared in The Joint Account does not constitute financial, legal, or any other professional advice. Readers should consult with their respective professionals for specific advice tailored to their situation. The information contained in this post is general in nature and for informational purposes only. It should not be considered as investment advice or as a recommendation of any particular strategy or investment product. This post is not a solicitation or an offer to buy or sell any specific security. Bone Fide Wealth cannot guarantee the accuracy of information from third parties.
We’ve removing the paywall for this important piece in our archives so you can read it as a companion to this week’s essay. Enjoy!!
Good advice, but isn't the phone becoming the lynchpin of everything with more stuff going to two factor or passkey, which you need the mobile device access? If the spouse passes or is long term disabled, I'd assume access to the device is not an issue, but do you have a workaround for just "joint" access if the spouse is traveling etc?