Contacts, beneficiaries & executors

An estate plan is
a list of people.

Documents are only half of it. Legacy Suite is where you invite the people you trust, record who inherits what, and name the two executors who will act for you — with an invitation each person has to accept before anything can be shared with them.

Add your first contact
Invitation must be acceptedSharing visible both ways

What goes wrong when the people are left undefined

Nobody knows who was asked

Being named in a document does not mean the person knows about it. Families routinely discover a role months later, at the worst possible moment, with no idea what was expected of them.

The wrong person is holding the bag

An executor chosen years ago may have moved away, fallen out of touch, or predeceased you. Without a named backup, the job lands wherever it lands.

No record of what was shared

You shared a file with someone in March. Did you? With whom? Most people have no way to answer that, in either direction.

The distinction worth learning

A contact is not a beneficiary, and neither is an executor

Three roles, three different jobs. People mix them up constantly, and mixing them up is how plans go wrong. Here is the difference in plain terms.

Trusted contact

Who can I share things with?

A person you invite by email. They receive the invitation, then accept or decline it. Once accepted, they become available in the pickers you use to share a document or a password entry, and they become eligible to be named as an executor. You can assign them a relationship and send a reminder if they have not replied.

Invited by email. Must accept.

Beneficiary

Who inherits what?

A will and estate concept, kept separately from your contacts. Beneficiaries are the people — or organizations — you name to receive assets. A non-profit search is built in, so a charity can be named as a beneficiary alongside family members.

A will concept. Includes non-profits.

Digital executor

Who acts for me afterward?

Two fixed roles — Digital Executor and Backup Digital Executor — each filled by one person chosen from your accepted trusted contacts. These are the people who can later start the Claim Property process on your behalf.

Exactly two roles. No more, no fewer.

Invite, accept, then share

A contact becomes usable at exactly one moment: when they accept.

Step 1

Invite the person

You enter their email address and the relationship they have to you. The invitation goes out and the contact sits in a pending state until they respond. If they go quiet, you can send a reminder.

Invitation sent

Waiting on their reply

Step 2

They accept or decline

The request appears on their contacts page and in their header notification bell. Accepting connects the two of you. Declining does not, and a declined invitation leaves you with nothing to share to.

1

Invitation accepted

Now eligible for sharing

Step 3

They show up where it counts

Accepted contacts appear in your share pickers for documents and password entries, and become eligible to hold one of the two executor seats. Everything you then share is logged in Shared Resources, visible from both sides.

My Executors

Two roles, and only two

Legacy Suite does not ask you to invent a committee. There is a Digital Executor and a Backup Digital Executor, and each seat holds exactly one person from your accepted trusted contacts.

Seat one

Digital Executor

Your primary appointment. This is the person who would begin the Claim Property process and submit the paperwork that a reviewer at Legacy Suite examines by hand.

Seat two

Backup Digital Executor

The second appointment, for when the first cannot serve. Naming a backup is the single cheapest piece of insurance in an estate plan, and it takes about thirty seconds.

Who is eligible

Executors come from your accepted contacts

You cannot type in a stranger's name. An executor is chosen from the trusted contacts who have already accepted your invitation, which means the person in the seat has, at minimum, agreed to be connected to you before the role was assigned.

Changing your mind

Reassigning a seat removes the incumbent first

A seat holds one person. When you appoint a replacement, the person currently in that seat is removed and the new appointment is set in their place. There is no queue and no shared seat — the change is a swap, and it takes effect as soon as you make it.

Shared Resources

What you shared, and what was shared with you

Sharing is only trustworthy when you can audit it. Shared Resources shows the exchange in both directions and lets you drill into any one person to see exactly what passes between you.

Shared With Me

Everything other people have shared with you, grouped by the person who shared it. Open any one of them to see the individual items.

Shared By Me

Everything you have shared outward, grouped by recipient. The same per-person detail view, from the other side.

How counts are split

Now versus after death, documents versus passwords

Each view carries a banner that splits the totals two ways: by timing — what is accessible now versus what is marked for after death — and by asset class. Sharing covers exactly two kinds of thing: files and passwords.

  • Documents shared nowNow
  • Documents marked after deathAfter death
  • Passwords shared nowNow
  • Passwords marked after deathAfter death

Two asset classes, nothing else. Voice and video messages use a separate mechanism and do not appear in these counts.

Marking something for after death does not make it automatic

Setting a share to after death records your intention. It does not arm a mechanism. There is no dead man's switch in Legacy Suite, no inactivity timer, and nothing that detects a death on its own.

When the time comes, the executor you named starts the Claim Property process: they upload a death certificate along with the supporting documents, and a person at Legacy Suite reviews the submission before anything is released. It is a manual, document-based review — which is slower than an automatic switch, and far harder to trigger by accident.

How the Claim Property review works

What this side of the product does, and what it does not

The people side of Legacy Suite is deliberately narrow. It manages relationships, roles, and the record of what has been shared. It does not watch you, and it does not act on its own.

What it does

  • Invites a trusted contact by email and tracks whether they accepted, declined, or have not replied
  • Surfaces inbound requests on your contacts page and in the header notification bell
  • Sends a reminder to a contact who has not responded yet
  • Records the relationship each contact has to you
  • Limits share pickers to contacts who have accepted, so nothing can be sent to an unconfirmed person
  • Names beneficiaries for your will, including charities found through non-profit search
  • Designates a Digital Executor and a Backup Digital Executor from your accepted contacts
  • Shows Shared With Me and Shared By Me, with per-person detail and counts split by timing and asset class

What it does not do

  • Detect that you have died, or notice that you have stopped logging in
  • Notify your contacts automatically when something happens to you
  • Release anything on a timer, a countdown, or an inactivity trigger
  • Grant after-death access without the human-reviewed Claim Property process
  • Encrypt what you store — no part of Legacy Suite claims cryptographic protection
  • Give an executor a login to your account, or any standing access to your data
  • Allow more than one Digital Executor or more than one Backup Digital Executor
  • Share anything beyond files and passwords through this system
Where this connects

Contacts are the plumbing for everything else.

Digital Suite

The documents you store are shared with accepted contacts, one recipient at a time, each with its own timing.

LegacyPass

Account entries carry their own recipient list, drawn from the same set of accepted contacts.

Claim Property

Only the Digital Executor and Backup Digital Executor you named can start a claim against your estate.

Your will

Beneficiaries feed the will builder, where you record who inherits what — family members and charities alike.

One list, used everywhere

You maintain a single set of trusted contacts. Every part of the product that shares something reads from that list, which means there is one place to add a person and one place to see where they already appear.

DocumentsPassword entriesExecutor seatsBeneficiaries

Keep going

The people side of the plan touches nearly every other part of the product. These are the pages that pick up where this one leaves off.

Digital Suite

Where the documents live, and where you choose which accepted contact receives each one.

Read more

LegacyPass

The record of account logins, shared entry by entry with the contacts you have confirmed.

Read more

Claim Property

The human-reviewed process your executor follows when the time actually comes.

Read more

Questions about contacts, beneficiaries and executors

Including what happens when nobody accepts, and what does not happen automatically.

A trusted contact is a person you invite into your Legacy Suite account by email address. The invitation is a request, not an assignment: they receive it, and they either accept or decline. Once someone has accepted, they become available everywhere the product asks you to choose a person — the share pickers for documents and password entries, and the two executor seats.
Nothing can be shared with them. A pending or declined contact does not appear in your share pickers and cannot be named as a Digital Executor or Backup Digital Executor. This is deliberate — it prevents you from carefully assigning access to an email address that was mistyped, abandoned, or belongs to someone who never agreed to the role. If a contact has gone quiet, you can send them a reminder from your contacts page.
Pending inbound requests surface in two places: on your contacts page, and in the notification bell in the header. From there you can accept or decline.
A trusted contact is an access concept — who is allowed to receive things from your account. A beneficiary is a will and estate concept — who inherits what. They are kept separately and they serve different purposes. The same person can be both, but naming someone as a beneficiary in your will does not give them access to anything in your account, and adding someone as a trusted contact does not make them an heir.
Yes. Beneficiaries include a non-profit search, so you can find an organization and name it alongside the individual people in your will.
Exactly two, in two fixed roles: Digital Executor and Backup Digital Executor. Each seat holds one person. There is no option to add a third, and no ability to invent custom role names — the two seats are the whole structure.
Only a trusted contact who has already accepted your invitation. You cannot type in the name of someone who is not connected to your account, which means every executor you name has at least confirmed the connection to you first.
Reassigning a seat removes the person currently in it, then sets the replacement. It is a swap rather than an addition — the seat holds one person before the change and one person after it. You can make the change whenever you like.
A two-directional view of everything exchanged through your account. Shared With Me lists what other people have shared with you; Shared By Me lists what you have shared outward. Both group by person, and you can open any individual to see the specific items that pass between you.
Two: files and passwords. Documents from your storage and entries from LegacyPass. The counts in Shared Resources are split by those two asset classes, and by timing — how many items are accessible now versus how many are marked for after death. Voice and video messages use a separate mechanism and do not appear in these counts.
No. Marking a share for after death records your intention; it does not arm anything. Legacy Suite has no dead man's switch, no inactivity timer, and no mechanism that detects a death. Access after death runs through the Claim Property process, where your executor uploads a death certificate and supporting documents and a person reviews the submission by hand before anything is released.
Not by the system. Legacy Suite does not detect death and does not send notifications on that basis. The process starts with a living person — the executor you named — choosing to begin a claim and submitting documentation for review. Tell the people you have named that they hold the role, because the product will not tell them at the moment it matters.
No. Naming someone as Digital Executor or Backup Digital Executor does not give them a login, a password, or any standing view of your data. It makes them the person eligible to start the Claim Property process later, which is a document submission reviewed by a human, not an unlock.
No, and we would rather say so plainly than let a padlock icon imply otherwise. Legacy Suite makes no encryption claims anywhere in the product. What the contacts system provides is access control and an auditable record of who received what — treat it as an organized, permissioned record rather than a cryptographic vault, and choose what you store accordingly.
Yes. Shared With Me shows what has been shared to you, grouped by the person who shared it, with a per-person detail view. Visibility runs in both directions by design, so neither side has to take the other's word for what was sent.

Name the people first.
The documents can wait.

Invite a contact, get the acceptance, and fill both executor seats. It takes a few minutes and it is the part of an estate plan that most people never get to.

Add your trusted contacts