Password managers
Your password manager already has a way to hand it over
If you use 1Password there’s a PDF called an Emergency Kit. It was offered to you once, on the day you signed up, and you almost certainly clicked past it.
If you use Bitwarden there’s a setting where you name somebody who can ask for access later, and gets it if you don’t say no within a period you choose.
Both work. Neither works if nobody knows it exists.
What the Emergency Kit is
1Password gives you a one-page PDF with your sign-in address, the email address on the account, and something called a Secret Key, which is a long code the company itself can’t recreate for you.
There’s a blank line for your account password, which you’re meant to fill in by hand.
That blank line is the point, and it is why the sheet has to be printed. Filled in and printed, it opens the account. Left on the computer it protects, it opens nothing when the computer is locked.
1Password’s own advice is to print it and keep it with your passport or birth certificate, and to give a copy to somebody you trust.
How Bitwarden’s version works
You name a trusted contact in advance. Later, that person asks for access, and you get an email telling you they have.
If you do nothing, they’re let in automatically once a waiting period you chose has passed. If you say no, they’re not, and they stay on the list and can ask again another time.
You choose between two levels. One lets them read everything saved in the account. The other lets them set a new master password and take it over, which removes your old one.
One thing worth knowing before you rely on it: emergency access is a paid feature. Free accounts don’t have it.
What happens with no arrangement at all
Usually nothing recoverable. These companies are built so that they can’t read what you keep with them. That’s the whole reason to use one, and it isn’t a policy they can set aside for a grieving family.
There’s no support line that can open it. That isn’t unhelpfulness. A company that could let your family in could also let somebody else in.
Where to keep the printed sheet
Not next to the computer. The sheet and the machine it unlocks in the same drawer is one theft rather than two.
A home safe works. So does a bank deposit box, with the caveat that a box can be sealed after a death in some places, so it should not be the only copy.
The thing to write down elsewhere is which manager you use and where the sheet is. Never the master password itself, which doesn’t belong on a page anybody can pick up.
Sources
Which manager, and where the kit is. Never the master password, which belongs on no page anybody can pick up. Here is a finished binder, free to read: the example binder.