MyLifeLocker™

How many bank accounts do you have? How many online accounts? How many subscriptions? If something were to happen to you today, and somebody had to take responsibility for your financial situation, how well have you documented your financial interests?

Is it possible that one of your accounts could be overlooked? You may have a small investment account, or an online betting account, what about a cryptocurrency investment, or a PayPal account. Maybe you are receiving revenues from a blog, or a YouTube channel.

Do you have ongoing payments for services that automatically charge unless you cancel?

The most difficult job for an Executor is gathering up your assets. MyLifeLocker™ makes this task manageable, and ensures that nothing gets overlooked.

There are two reasons why this is a bad idea.

Your assets change over time, but a Will has very formal signing requirements. Every change that is made to your Will must be initialled, and then initialled by two attending witnesses. You really don't want to do this too many times to the same document. It makes much more sense to document your assets separately and to store this inventory with your formal Will. Your Will typically refers to "your estate" which is made up of whatever assets you own at the time of your death.

Furthermore, once your Will is probated, then it becomes a public document; anybody can read it. You may not want everybody to read details of all of your assets. And certainly not online accounts. It is more discrete to keep this information in a separate document that will not go through the probate process.

MyLifeLocker™ is made up of fifty sections. These are broadly categorised as information about your family. It then allows you to describe your important assets, like a home, any vehicles, storage boxes, and perhaps a safe.

The next section deals with your money; bank accounts, retirement and pension plans, insurance policies, credit cards, loans.

There is a separate section for your digital assets including all online accounts.

MyLifeLocker™ then allows you to include the details of important people to contact including banks, doctors, funeral homes and others.

Finally, there is a section for "Everything Else" including charities, Executor instructions and instructions for anybody appointed through a Power of Attorney.

Who has access to MyLifeLocker™?

This is set up through our Keyholder® System. You can secure your information, and then grant access for specific individuals. They are given a unique Keyholder® ID that gives them access to certain services that you have set up within your account. If a Keyholder® tries to view your LifeLocker, you will be notified. If, after a period of time, you do not block this access, then your Keyholder® (usually your Executor) will be able to view the contents of your LifeLocker.

Are there uses for this beyond providing information for my Executor?

Yes. If you have set up a Power of Attorney for Finances, then you are giving somebody the responsibility to handle your financial affairs if you were ever incapacitated.

If this person is not familiar with your financial portfolio, it is a daunting responsibility. You can make your attorney one of your Keyholders®, and they will be able to access your LifeLocker if you were ever incapacitated.

Yes. This is an increasingly important topic. If you were to pass away, who will take responsibility for your Facebook account? Your online photo storage? Your digital music collection? Your PayPal account? Your LinkedIn Profile? Your Paddy Power account? Your Bitcoin? If you have stored the last ten years of family photos in Apple's cloud or in Google photos, you have to make sure that this important asset is not lost.

The security of your information is critical to the business success of LegalWills.co.za. It is a core tenet of our business. We are GDPR compliant and store all information in an encrypted format on our servers. No information is stored as plain text. Over the 24 years we have been in business, we have never experienced unauthorised access to our servers, but even if this happened, the data from our MyLifeLocker™ service would not be visible. Read more information about our security