Help setting up your iGoodbye.com account
Once you have established an account, it is time to place information on the site that will be useful to your heirs should anything ever happen to you. You can divide this task into 3 parts.
1. Create your document.
Gather the information you wish to pass on. This might be URLs (website address), with user IDs and passwords for your bank and trading accounts, it might be names and addresses of critical business contacts, or perhaps backup copies of wills, trusts, powers of attorney etc. Only you know what's important. Chances ares this information will also change with time, so be sure to periodically review this document and update it.
2. Create your recipients
Think carefully about who your intended recipients are and get important contact information from them (email address, cell phone, mailing address etc). This is especially important if you wish us to locate your recipients upon your death, rather than depend on them to contact us. Login to iGoodbye.com and click on edit/view/add recipients to set up an account for each of your recipients.
3. Upload your document(s)
For maximum privacy and safety, we recommend encrypting your own documents (see our encryption page for helpful hints). When you upload a document, you will be asked if you want to download the document to be sure it uploaded properly, and checking this is a good idea. When you click "Next", you are offered three encryption options:
a. Use System Encryption
b. Use client's private key
c. No encryption
If you encrypt your own documents, just choose "No Encryption", since you have already done the encryption yourself.
Some clients feel intimidated by encryption packages, and feel safe using the encryption provided by iGoodbye.com. It is our express policy never to examine the contents of your files, however, theoretically, you must trust us if you choose this option. Your document will be in an encrypted form as it travels through the Internet, but it will arrive on our server in a form that we could potentially read. If you then choose "use client's private key" you will be prompted for a secret password (you must enter it twice). Once you encrypt the document, no one (including iGoodbye.com staff) can ever decrypt the document without knowing your password. Our server then electronically shreds your original document so that it cannot be recovered. You can retrieve your document at any time by logging in, and going to the recipient documents and select "view". You will be prompted for your password, and then be able to download the document in a readable form.
In the two above options, it is assumed that you will give your password to your intended heirs, and tell them to contact iGoodbye.com if anything ever happens to you. Some clients feel that they cannot trust their heirs to remember a password, and prefer that iGoodbye.com encrypts the documents. If this applies to you, you may want to use the "use system encryption" option. In this case you don't need a password. Our system will encrypt with our password, and we will decrypt the options anytime you or your recipients request. Please note, that this option again requires that you trust us, and also requires that you request the files by email (with the other options you can get your files anytime just by logging in and downloading files).
If you are worried about your heirs not being able to reliably remember a secret password, you may want to consider placing your password and instructions about iGoodbye.com in a sealed envelope and including it with your will and keep this will either in your safe deposit box or with your attorney.