This article was written on 17th June 2020, around four months into the lockdown. Very little was known about what would happen and there was an aura of grim in the air.

A few weeks ago, I began reading books that prompted me to contemplate my mortality. Without intending to sound alarmist, and with a pragmatic mindset, I honestly didn't believe I would live beyond the next 10 years. This isn't meant to evoke fear or depression, but rather an acceptance of my finite time on this planet. If anything, it has motivated me to live more fully and make the best of what I've been given.

One of my favorite childhood authors, Rick Riordan, puts it best

However, when I bring up mortality in conversation, I often encounter denial and ignorance. Responses like "Don't talk like that," "You're just panicking, we're fine," or "The world has always been this way" are common. My intention is not to spread paranoia but to encourage contemplation about the inevitable end of our journey. From the moment you wake up, all you are guaranteed is 24 hours to live. It's both arrogant and foolish to think otherwise.

Somewhere along the way, someone might have told you that you'd live until you're 80, and you internalized it as a false guarantee. Yet, every morning you wake up could potentially be your last day alive.

This realization transformed my life in two significant ways. Firstly, it compelled me to embrace each day to the fullest, recognizing it as a true blessing that will never come again. Secondly, it motivated me to establish safety measures for a worst-case scenario, bringing comfort in the knowledge that if I were to die today, my legacy would be secure. This post primarily addresses the latter aspect.

I understand that thinking about death may be challenging. You're young, full of life, and there's so much left to do, right? That's absolutely true. However, avoiding the topic of death is perhaps the worst way to squander your life. Accepting the reality and preparing for it is essential. You've accomplished remarkable things, saved diligently, and worked hard. Don't let your death ruin it all.

I'll now share the steps I've taken, and you can use them as a guide, provided you approach this matter with the right perspective. If you're looking to cover the basics, feel free to jump straight to the last step. Starting there already puts you ahead of the curve. But before we dive in, take a few moments to categorize the closest people in your life into the following five groups. It's crucial to note that individuals cannot belong to more than one group (someone from group A cannot be in group B )

• Group A: Beneficiaries - These are the individuals who will inherit your assets when you pass away. This group typically includes your parents, siblings, spouses, and children.


• Group B: Executor - This is the person or organization responsible for carrying out your final wishes. It's important to choose someone you trust implicitly, someone who will ensure that your specified instructions are followed diligently. If you're a citizen, I highly recommend engaging a lawyer or an organization with expertise in this area (ideally the same one your parents have used). If you're not a citizen, you can select a responsible friend for this role.


• Group C: Legacy contacts - These are the individuals who will manage your social media accounts appropriately after your passing. In my case, I opted for friends who possess the technical know-how to handle this task effectively and are also close enough to me that nothing on my online profiles will come as a surprise to them.


• Group D : Witnesses - You'll need two mentally competent individuals who can attest that you were of sound mind when you presented your will. It's essential to have witnesses validate your documentation; otherwise, all your efforts could be inadmissible.


• Group E : Notary - This person is authorized to approve your will and related documents. The notary and witnesses typically work together in this process.

Now that we have the technical words out of the way, here's how to go about it. You can do these in any order, but if you really just want the easy way out, (which is what I did), head to the last option

Set up your beneficiaries

Here's a surprising tidbit I recently learned: if you're investing for your retirement through a stock broker (like Fidelity, for example) and you pass away, there's no obligation for them to inform anyone that you had savings with them. Your money can essentially remain hidden until the statute of limitations allows them to claim it. This discovery left me not so much shocked by the rule itself but more at my own gullibility in assuming that a corporation always has my best interests at heart.

To safeguard your assets, it's crucial to go through all your investment accounts and brokerages and set up your beneficiaries. This process is quite straightforward and comes highly recommended. After you've completed this step, make sure to inform your chosen beneficiaries about it. In the unfortunate event of your passing, they'll need to reach out to the brokerage and facilitate the withdrawal of your funds. You can provide them with the initial steps, which I'll outline below.

Plan your digital afterlife

Here's another intriguing fact: by the year 2060, there will be more accounts of deceased individuals than those of the living. My mind occasionally drifts to my old Orkut, Yahoo, Myspace, and Hotmail accounts floating somewhere up there in the cloud; I hope they're doing well.

Your online presence is quite significant, and as the first generation to truly have one, we were never taught how to protect it. Think about it - after you've passed away, are you comfortable with the idea of your email and social media accounts just lingering in the digital realm? How many readers right now have encountered spam accounts impersonating them, struggling to shut them down? If someone were to gain access to one of these accounts, your identity could be misused in ways you can't imagine. Plus, I'm assuming that most of us tend to use the same password for multiple online profiles, which means it wouldn't take long before your entire online persona is compromised.

To get ahead of this, you have to set up your Legacy Contacts . A legacy contact is someone you authorize to take control of your account once you've passed away. Most social media platforms offer this option, and it would be in your best interest to set them up now.

Here is what I would request from my Legacy Contact:

1. Download my social media profile offline as a backup, just in case.
2. Remove all my photos and albums from my online presence.
3. Announce on the social platform that I have passed away (as not all my friends and followers would likely know).
4. Permanently deactivate or memorialize the account.

If you're a content creator, you have the added challenge of figuring out how your work is used. You might have sounds, art, images, and words that could be plagiarized without consent. For those truly interested in this, I'd recommend this podcast on planning your digital afterlife.

Get your Will up and running

If, like me, you're an immigrant in a foreign country, hiring an estate lawyer can be a hard expense to justify. In that case, you can skip this step and move on to the next one. However, if you are a citizen residing in your home nation, you should waste no time in setting up a Will. You can do it yourself; there are plenty of templates available online. Even better, you can reach out to your parents and see what they did. Writing a Will may seem tricky, and it is, but it's genuinely a one-time thing, and then you can forget about it.

The Ace in the Hole

Okay, you've either skipped right to this from the top, or you've read all the way through and realized you're too lazy to do the rest. Either way works for me because when I first found out how much work this was, I almost gave up.

Luckily, like the sneaky little Indian boy that I am, I was also on the lookout for loopholes - anything that can achieve pretty much the same result with lower effort and without talking to anyone else. So here's what I did. It took me around 2 hours tops, but I'm now set up for the worst-case scenario.

1. Open up an Excel document (or create a table in Word), and grab your phone.
2. In three columns, list out every app that you have on your phone, along with the username and password for the app. When I say every, I mean it. Your social media, your banks, cryptocurrencies, Xfinity connection, even Netflix. Any app or website that you use for more than 15 minutes in a day or once a week should be on this list.
3. Now, for each app, choose the person you'd trust to take over it when you die. This persons job is pretty much to make sure your account is removed properly. Its pretty obvious that different people need to be entrusted with different apps. My mom gets my bank account details, but there's no way I can trust her to close out my Facebook.
4. In the next column, write down instructions on exactly what needs to be done with each app. If it's a social media app, you'll ideally want to send a status out to the world to let them know you're dead. Or maybe memorialize your account. If it's a trading app like Robinhood, you'd want all your stocks to be cashed out and then transferred to your bank account. The point is to think about how you want to be removed from the app. The instructions can be as detailed or vague as needed; after all, you're not the one who'll end up following them.
5. Save this information in a password protected PDF. It's easy to do.
6. Open up Gmail, we're going to compose an Email (lil Dr. Seuss there for ya). Gmail has an underrated feature called Schedule Send, which is exactly what it sounds like. You can schedule an email to go out anytime in the future. That's our Ace in the Hole.
7. Add your recipients to this email (or break them up into multiple ones), attach the password-protected PDF, and then compose a message. It could be as simple as letting the recipient know that in the case of your death, here's the information they need, as well as instructions on how to execute them. DO NOT put in any private information here. Any private information should be in that PDF.
8. Schedule this email 3 months to a year in the future (its September right now; Let's say I set mine to December).
9. Compose another email, this one is going to be to yourself. It's basically a reminder about the previous step (you can even use your phone if its easier). You're going to write a reminder email that says "Hey you, if you're reading this, then guess what, you didn't die yet. This is a reminder for you to push that other email further down the line. See you soon".
10. Schedule this email to go out 2 weeks before the previous one (in our example, November 15th)

And thats pretty much it!
Every 6 to 8 months, if you're alive, you just have to push the 'Scheduled Send' date to further ahead. You can even update the PDF if you've taken on more assest or changed your passwords.
Now you're thinking, 'Why don't I just set the email to go out 2 years from now?' , I'd advise against that. This information you're sending unfortunately does have an expiry date. If you die in 2020, and the email gets delivered by 2022, most of the content will be irrelevant (passwords might be invalid, your accounts might be locked out). So I've chosen a 6 month timeframe.




But that's all there is. Invest some time and make the effort to get this done. We're not here forever. While the average life expectancy of a human being has increased over the past few decades, don't forget to consider your surroundings. You may have the potential to live until you're 80, but the world might not allow you to reach that age. Taking steps like this can bring a sense of calm to your mind (it certainly did for me), knowing that even if I'm no longer around, my legacy is hopefully taken care of.




"Yes, man is mortal, but that would be only half the trouble. The worst of it is that he's sometimes unexpectedly mortal"
- Mikhail Bulgakov