Where to Start

When someone you love is gone — and their online life is still running

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Read this first

You do not need to handle any of this today.

Almost everything about a loved one’s online accounts can wait weeks — often months. Grief comes first. The paperwork will still be there.

This guide exists for one reason: a small number of actions in the first days — actions that feel responsible, even urgent — can accidentally lock you out of everything else, or erase things you can never get back. Nobody warns families about them. Once you know what they are, you can set this guide down and come back when you’re ready.

Two promises before we start:

• Nothing here requires their passwords. Every step works through official channels.
• No documents ever come to us. When the time comes to send a death certificate anywhere, it goes directly to each company’s own official process — never to Digital Farewells.

Part One: Five things NOT to do this week

These are the mistakes that can’t be undone. Everything else in this process is forgiving. These five are not.

1. Do not cancel their mobile phone plan.

That phone number is the master key to their digital life. Banks, email providers, and dozens of other accounts send security codes and password-reset texts to it. Cancel the plan, and within weeks the number is recycled to a stranger — who then starts receiving your loved one’s bank alerts.

There’s a quieter loss too. When a number goes unused and is reassigned, WhatsApp treats it as a new person and clears the old account’s data from its servers. The message history goes with the number.

Cancelling the phone feels like the responsible, money-saving first move. It is the single most common way families lock themselves out of everything else.

Instead: keep the line active for now. Every major carrier — Rogers, Bell, and Telus in Canada; Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile in the US — allows the number to be transferred to a family member rather than cancelled. Canadian carriers generally waive early-cancellation fees when an account ends because the holder has died, but that’s company policy rather than law, so ask rather than assume. A financed handset is a separate matter: the remaining balance is either paid off or the device returned. There is no rush.

2. Do not cancel their internet or TV bundle — yet.

If their email address ends in @shaw.ca, @sympatico.ca, @telus.net, or another internet-provider address, that email account may be tied to the internet service itself. Cancel the bundle, and the email address every other account recovery depends on can die with it.

Instead: before touching the bundle, find out where their main email lives. If it’s a provider address, ask the company — explicitly, before any changes — whether the email survives a plan change or cancellation. Get the answer in writing if you can.

3. Do not rush to close their credit cards.

This one surprises people. Closing the cards feels like protecting the estate. But that card is quietly keeping things alive: the phone plan above, website domains, a family business’s website hosting. When the card dies, those services start silent countdowns — and some end in permanent loss.

There’s a second reason to wait: many credit card reward programs require points to be redeemed or transferred before the account closes. Close the card first, and the points — sometimes worth thousands of dollars — can be forfeited.

Instead: pull recent statements, list what the card is paying for, protect the essentials, redeem or transfer the points, and then close the card deliberately. (If you suspect active fraud on the account, that changes things — call the bank’s estate or fraud line right away.)

4. Do not notify loyalty and points programs — yet.

Airline miles, hotel points, grocery rewards. Some programs will transfer the full balance to family with simple paperwork. Others state in their terms that the moment they’re notified of a death, the account closes and every point is forfeited.

Telling the wrong program too early destroys real value, irreversibly — a large airline-miles balance can be worth thousands of dollars in travel.

Instead: make a list of every program first, then check each program’s own written policy before you notify anyone. The windows differ enormously. Under current published terms, Scotiabank’s rewards program gives the estate 60 days from the date of death before unredeemed points are cancelled permanently. WestJet is far more generous — the account closes on notification, but the points stay claimable for twelve months afterward. The lesson isn’t that you must hurry. It’s that the terms vary so widely that you have to read each one rather than assume.

5. Do not delete anything.

Not the accounts. Not the profiles. Don’t wipe the phone, and don’t reset the computer.

Deletion is permanent everywhere. Companies are generally explicit about this: once an account is closed, no request for its contents — the photos, the emails, the messages — can be processed afterward. Not by family, not by a lawyer, not by a court.

The order that protects you is always the same: save what matters first, deal with money second, close accounts last.

Closure is the final step of this process, never the first.

Want this as a printable PDF?

The same guide, designed to print and keep with the paperwork — useful when you’re coordinating with family. We’ll email it to you, and that’s the only reason we ask.

One email with the PDF. A few gentle follow-ups you can stop anytime. No passwords, no documents, ever.

Part Two: Three things worth doing this week — when you’re ready

None of these are emergencies measured in hours. But each one either protects something irreplaceable or makes everything that follows easier.

1. Preserve their voice and their photos first.

Saved voicemails may be the only recording of your loved one’s voice that exists — and they don’t live on the phone. They live on the carrier’s servers, which means they depend on that account staying open. Before anything happens to the phone account, play each voicemail on speaker and record it with another phone. Simple is fine. Done is what matters.

The same goes for voice messages in apps like WhatsApp, and for photos that exist only on the phone. Messaging apps run their own deletion clocks: WhatsApp’s official policy is that accounts are generally deleted after about 120 days of inactivity, and Telegram deletes inactive accounts automatically — after 18 months by default, but the account owner can set that timer much shorter, and there is no way to check without the device. If the family lawfully has the person’s phone and it’s unlocked, saving those recordings and photos comes before every other digital task on this list.

2. Flag the credit bureaus.

This is the single most powerful free action available to you, and almost nobody tells families about it.

Contact the credit bureaus — Equifax Canada and TransUnion Canada, or in the US, Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion — and ask them to place a deceased flag on your loved one’s credit file. It’s free, and it does two things at once:

• It shuts the door on identity thieves. Fraud against the recently deceased is common — criminals scan obituaries and open credit in the deceased’s name. The flag stops new credit cold. Placing the flag is the easy part: a death certificate and your own identification are generally enough.
• It hands you a map. On the same form, you can also request a copy of the credit file — a ready-made list of their credit cards, loans, and financial accounts, the account inventory that would otherwise take weeks of drawer-searching to build. Note that in Canada this second request is the more demanding one: Equifax asks for court or probate documents proving the will, though a will executed before a notary in Quebec is accepted without them.

3. Gather, and make the list.

Three small collections that make everything else possible:

• Death certificates. Order more official copies than you think you need — many families find five to ten copies get used. Nearly every account process will ask for one.
• The devices. Note which phones, tablets, and computers exist, and which accounts are still signed in on them. Don’t log out of anything. A signed-in device is often the only remaining door to photos and files.
• The paper trail. Twelve months of bank and credit card statements reveal the subscriptions, memberships, and renewals nobody knew about.

Everything else can wait

Facebook profiles, email accounts, streaming subscriptions, online shopping accounts — none of them need attention this week. Social media platforms don’t delete accounts just because someone has died. Subscriptions can be cancelled next month with no penalty beyond one more billing cycle. The email account should actually stay open for now, because other account closures depend on it.

If you take one thing from this guide, take this: the families who run into trouble aren’t the ones who moved too slowly. They’re the ones who moved too fast.

Want this as a printable PDF?

The same guide, designed to print and keep with the paperwork — useful when you’re coordinating with family. We’ll email it to you, and that’s the only reason we ask.

One email with the PDF. A few gentle follow-ups you can stop anytime. No passwords, no documents, ever.

When you’re ready for the next step

What comes after is a longer road: each platform — Facebook, Google, Apple, the banks’ apps, the airlines, the phone company — has its own process, its own required documents, and its own quirks, and they differ between Canada and the United States.

We’re building The First Steps Kit to walk through it platform by platform: the exact official channels, the documents each one accepts and rejects, realistic timelines, and the order that protects you — for Canadian and American families both.

No passwords. No documents sent to us. Just the map.

Every claim in this guide is checked against the platforms’ and companies’ own published terms, verified as of August 2026. Where a policy could not be confirmed from a primary source, we say so. Policies change without announcement — if you are reading this well after that date, confirm any specific number against the company’s current terms before acting on it. That’s the standard for everything we publish.