The phone number
Don’t cancel the phone for six months
Cancelling the phone contract is one of the first tidying-up jobs people reach for. It feels like progress, it saves a few pounds a month, and it is close to the worst thing to do early.
The bank sends its code to that number. So does the email. So does the account you would have used to reset the other two.
A phone number stopped being a way of reaching somebody a while ago. It quietly became a key, and almost nobody noticed the change.
What breaks
Most banks, most email providers and most of the accounts underneath them will send a code by text before they let anybody in. Cancel the number and every one of those doors closes at once.
Worse, they close in a way that looks like nobody’s fault. The family isn’t locked out by a rule anybody wrote down. They’re locked out because the second step of the check now goes nowhere.
Getting back in usually means proving who you are to each company separately. The number was there to avoid exactly that.
The number doesn’t sit empty
Once a number is properly disconnected it goes into a pool and is given to somebody else. In the United States the rule sets a minimum of 45 days before that can happen, and the FCC keeps a database of reassigned numbers so companies can check.
Forty-five days isn’t long. It is roughly the point at which a family has finished the funeral and started on the paperwork.
After that, texts intended for the person who died go to a stranger. Not out of malice on anybody’s part, and there’s no way to call them back.
What to do instead
Move the number to the cheapest plan the carrier offers and leave it running. It costs very little, and it buys the family time.
Put it in the name of whoever is dealing with the estate, so the bill has somewhere to go and the account doesn’t lapse by accident.
Keep the handset charged and somewhere findable. A code that arrives on a phone in a drawer at an apartment nobody has been to is the same as no code at all.
Six months is the usual advice. Longer does no harm.
The exception
A number nothing points at can go whenever you like. A second line, a work cell, a tablet with its own number.
Telling the two apart takes a minute if somebody wrote down which accounts send codes where, and takes months if nobody did.
Sources
Which number the codes go to is one line, and your family will need it before they think to look. Here is a finished binder, free to read: the example binder.