Nobody wants to think about death: for the fortunate, it comes like a “thief in the night”, snuffing us out in our sleep; for too many, it’s a merciful ending to trauma — an accident, violence or disease. After all, death is final, while life’s for the living.

Once it’s over, our loved ones get to sift through the remnants. And even with a will in place, which not nearly enough of us have, and an emergency folder laying out what to do, who to contact and where to go should you become incapacitated or die, the dead leave uncomfortable chaos in their wake, and for their families, it lumps more heartache on to a mess.

Someone always has to clean up — from deciding what to do with the unwanted tchotchkes, to who gets guilted into keeping the tasteless art, to who has sight of the “classy” boudoir photos and the kinky toys, and, most importantly, one would argue, what to do with the remains of their loved one.

Rachelle Best speaks from experience. The chartered accountant says when her “super-organised” parents died, they had just about all their matters in order, but not some critical aspects, which left Best and her family quibbling over whether they preferred cremation to burial and what to play at the ceremony. It’s the little things that count, in the end.

It inspired her to develop the Heritage Vault, a cloud-based estate planning tool, which addresses any questions your loved ones and financial advisers are likely to have — from where you keep the spare safe key, what your social media passwords are, how you’d like to be buried — or not — to what you’d like played at your funeral.

And because we all have some secrets we’d rather take to the grave, there’s provision for a “clean-up squad”, who could be one or many trusted souls with access to your social media accounts, your laptop, boudoir or other belongings, to clear out any incriminating or embarrassing evidence.

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A will, a few life policies and an old-fashioned “in case of emergency” folder won’t cover it, Best says, especially when such a large part of our lives plays out in the digital space.

“As organised as I thought my parents were — and as organised as they told me they were — I could literally not find anything after they passed away. So I decided that there’s something here that one needs to be able to do to solve this problem of how do you organise stuff… how do you plan for your death?”

Heritage Vault is an encrypted digital solution that enables users to store their important estate information securely and make it easily accessible to their appointed confidants when they die or become incapacitated.  

The digital vault, which has bank-level security, holds all relevant data, from your basic personal information to your contacts and passwords, from ownership and assets documentation to all the details of your financial and consumer accounts, as well as a copy of your last will and testament and your living will. The data is securely stored in the cloud on backed-up block storage in the European Union. Each Heritage Vault is stored individually, which means if one is somehow hacked, the others cannot be raided. 

Best is confident in the level of security for the digital vault, saying users can access their vault with a time-release mechanism that only they control and configure.

“Your vault has special features such as distinct Clean-up Squad lockbox that enables you to instruct a nominated confidant on how to deal with any sensitive belongings, photos, videos, or documents that you want disposed of with utmost discretion. Every aspect of estate planning is covered, but there’s also a lot more.”

Heritage Vault is offered as a subscription service (either monthly at $3.50, or annual, $25 basis for one vault with 250MB of cloud space, that can be expanded). New users get a 30-day trial with no credit card details needed. BM/DM