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Legacy Recovery & Destruction Protocol

A template for people who want to leave their family a clear, secure way to recover what matters and destroy what shouldn't survive them, without handing any single person, document, or password the power to do both by accident.

The problem this solves

Most "in case I die" plans fall into one of two traps:

  • One document, one password. Everything (bank logins, crypto seed phrases, private files, "delete this" instructions) lives behind a single passphrase. Lose the password and your family is locked out of everything. Leak it, and a stranger has everything too.
  • One person, too much trust. A single executor, partner, or friend is asked to hold the whole plan, including irreversible actions like destroying data. That's a lot to ask of one person, and a single point of failure if they're unavailable, untrustworthy, or gone themselves.

The Legacy Recovery & Destruction Protocol (LRDP) splits the problem into two separate questions, each with its own authority and its own threshold:

  1. What should survive you: accounts, assets, documents, messages to family.
  2. What should disappear: private material you don't want kept, and secrets that no longer need to exist once recovery is complete.

No one custodian can do either alone. No one document contains both.

Who this is for

Anyone who wants a structured, reviewable, forkable plan instead of a single sticky note or a password manager entry titled "IF I DIE." This is especially useful if you hold:

  • Cryptocurrency or other assets with no traditional recovery path
  • Sensitive personal or professional material you'd want removed, not inherited
  • Multiple people you trust individually, but who don't know each other

How to use this template

  1. Read Why Not a Single Passphrase and The LRDP Model to understand the design.
  2. Read Custodian Roles, Family Recovery Package, and Destruction Package to see what each part actually contains.
  3. Read Verifying the Triggering Event. This is the part people skip, and shouldn't.
  4. Follow Build Your Own to adapt this into your actual plan.

This is a template, not legal advice

This describes a structure, not a law firm's opinion on your estate. Pair it with a will, a named executor, and ideally an estate attorney who knows the plan exists. Nothing here should conflict with legal retention requirements; see Destruction Package for how to handle that.