A vault or a sealed letter with your solicitor?

The traditional answer to “how do I leave something for my family to find” is a sealed envelope lodged with the solicitor who holds your will. It is a good answer. It has worked for a century, it costs almost nothing, and it carries a weight that no web service will ever have.

It also cannot do several of the things people now need it to do, and the gap has widened every year since about 2005. This is an honest account of what each one is good at. We sell one of them, so the useful thing we can offer is precision about where ours does not belong.

What the solicitor’s letter is genuinely better at

It has legal weight

A will is an instrument. It appoints an executor, it transfers property, it can be enforced. Nothing you upload to any service does any of that. If the question is who inherits the house, there is one answer and it is not a vault.

A letter of wishes lodged alongside the will is not binding either, but it is read in the room, by the people acting on the will, with the solicitor present. That context matters.

It will outlive the business that holds it

Most solicitors store a will free if they drafted it, and the profession has machinery for what happens when a firm folds. In England and Wales, if the firm closed, the Solicitors Regulation Authority can help trace where the will went. No technology company has an equivalent. This is the single strongest argument for paper, and it is why we tell people not to let any service — including this one — be the only place their plan exists.

It cannot be hacked, phished or locked out

An envelope in a fireproof cabinet has no password, no two factor code, no account recovery flow and no breach notification. That is not nothing.

A human being reads the room

A solicitor hands over a letter knowing who is sitting in front of them and what has just happened. Software delivers on a schedule to an address, and does not know that the address belongs to someone who died first.

What the solicitor’s letter cannot do

1. It has no trigger

This is the big one and it is structural, not fixable. A sealed letter sits there until a person who knows it exists contacts a firm that has learned you have died. Every link in that chain is a human remembering something. If nobody knows the envelope exists, nothing happens, ever.

Plenty of families discover a letter years later during a house clearance. A switch exists precisely to remove that dependency: it fires on a clock rather than on somebody’s memory.

2. Anything in a will becomes public

People put passwords in wills. Do not do this.

In England and Wales, once probate is granted the will becomes a public document. The record appears online roughly a fortnight later, and anyone at all can order a copy — including the will — for £16. Probated wills are public court records across most of the United States and Australia too. A password written into a will is a password published, with your address attached, to anyone who cares to pay a small fee.

A separate sealed letter avoids that, because it is not part of the will and is not lodged with the court. But it inherits the timing problem below.

3. The timing is measured in months

Probate in the United States commonly runs six to eighteen months depending on the state, and a contested estate can stay open for years. In England and Wales a grant takes weeks to months after the application, and the application itself takes time to prepare. That is the correct pace for transferring a house. It is the wrong pace for almost everything digital.

Consider what actually needs to happen quickly:

• Somebody has to pay the hosting bill before the website your business runs on lapses.
• Somebody has to reach the two factor device before the phone number is recycled.
• Somebody has to know the password to the account that receives the invoices.
• Somebody has to be told where the cat’s medication is.

None of those can wait for a grant of probate. A letter opened in month eight is a letter that arrived after the damage.

4. Executors often cannot legally read your messages

Even with the right paperwork, an executor is not automatically entitled to the contents of your communications. Under the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, adopted in some form by more than forty US states, a fiduciary can generally get the catalogue of a digital account — who you emailed, when — but the actual content of emails and messages needs explicit authorisation that you gave while alive.

Meanwhile the top of that same priority order is not the will at all: it is the provider’s own legacy tool. If you set up Google’s Inactive Account Manager or Apple’s Legacy Contact, that instruction outranks what your will says about that account. Your solicitor’s envelope sits below it.

5. Updating it is a phone call and an appointment

You change a password every few months. A letter with a solicitor is updated by writing a new one and arranging to swap it. Almost nobody does this more than once. Which means the envelope is accurate on the day it was sealed and drifts from then on, quietly, for years.

6. A safety deposit box is a trap

Worth saying because it is such a common instinct. Do not put the will, or the letter that explains the will, in a bank deposit box. The bank generally cannot open the box until probate is granted, and probate needs the will. People genuinely do this and their families genuinely get stuck.

The division of labour that actually works

Not “one or the other”. They do different jobs, and the split is clean once you see it.

With your solicitor

• The will itself, and the executor’s authority.
• Property, money, guardianship, anything that needs a court to recognise it.
• A letter of wishes about things that are personal rather than legal: the funeral, who gets the things without market value, the explanation of a decision that will otherwise be argued about.
• A note saying that a digital plan exists, where it is, and who to contact. Not the credentials. Just the pointer.

In a vault, or something like one

• Credentials and recovery keys, which must never appear in a document that becomes public.
• The instructions that are time-critical — the hosting bill, the domain, the business handover, the animal.
• Files: scans, photographs, the archive, the thing that is 400MB and belongs to one person.
• The personal letter you want to arrive as itself rather than be read aloud by a stranger in an office.
• Anything you would revise more than once a year.

On paper, in a place someone you trust can reach

• The master password or recovery path for the vault itself.
• One sentence saying the vault exists and who it will contact.

That third list is not an afterthought. Every plan built on a single service has one point of failure, and it is the service. Ours included.

The two sentences to add to your file today

If you take nothing else from this, add these to whatever your solicitor holds:

“A digital plan exists.” Name the service, name the email address the account is under, and name the person who has been told about it. Do not include a password. This one line is what turns a vault from a thing nobody knew about into a thing your executor can ask about.

“Do not treat anything in my will as confidential.” Obvious to a solicitor, not obvious to the person writing the draft at their kitchen table, and the reason passwords keep ending up in public court records.

What we would say if you asked us directly

Keep the solicitor. Write the will. Lodge the letter of wishes. None of that is replaceable and we are not going to pretend a subscription is a substitute for an instrument that a court will enforce.

Then take the two categories a will handles badly — secrets, and anything with a deadline shorter than probate — and put those somewhere with a clock on it. That is the entire argument for this kind of product, and it is a narrower argument than most of our competitors make.

If you want the practical version of the letter itself, we wrote how to write a letter of instruction your family can actually use, including a template. If you want to know what a vault does with a password once you put one in it, how your files are encrypted is specific about where the encryption starts and stops. And the free plan needs no card if you would rather look than read.

We are not lawyers and none of this is legal advice. Probate, public record rules and fiduciary access laws differ by country and by state, and the figures above are current as of September 2026. Ask your own solicitor about your own jurisdiction before you rely on any of it.