Episode 371: Do you know your legacy contact?
In this episode, Fiona shares the importance of Legacy Contact. She also discusses the significance of preparing for unforeseen circumstances. Tune in!
Topics discussed in this episode:
Introduction
Personal experience of sudden loss
Importance of preparing for unexpected events
The significance of having a legacy contact
Assist aging family members in securing digital assets
Conclusion
Get in touch with My Daily Business
Resources and Recommendations mentioned in this episode:
Welcome to episode 371 of the My Daily Business podcast. Today it is a quick tip episode and honestly, whether you have a business or not, anyone who has any kind of smartphone or wants to read today's podcast episode before we get stuck into that, I want to acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians on the land on which I record this podcast, and that is the Wurrung and Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. I pay my respects to their elders, past and present, and acknowledge that sovereignty has never been ceded. Let's get into today's quick tip episode.
If you are reading this in real-time, it is Tuesday the 26th of December, and we are gearing up for a week. Then we'll be finished with 2023. I am bringing you today's quick tip because it is influenced heavily by the passing of my father, which happened four years ago to almost the day. This time, four years ago, 26th of December, I was on holiday. I was on the first day of holiday down at the coast with my husband and my kids. The next day, the 27th of December, we went out for breakfast and we were about to go into town and just have a look at the shops and have a wander down the pier. I got a phone call from my sister to say that the nursing home that my dad was at had called to say he'd had a bit of a turn for the worst.
This is a bit of a shock because I'd just seen him on Christmas day. We'd spent Christmas day together, and while he had health issues, we were not expecting something like this. My sister, who was also away at the time, it was right before all of the bushfires happened in early 2020 in Australia. She was coming from an area that had been sort of impacted by bushfires, but she was safe and everything. We had to meet, I remember just driving and meeting her, and this was the 27th of December. We got up to Melbourne. It was a few hours' drive, and by the time we got up to Melbourne, my father was in a state where they were just keeping him comfortable and we had the privilege of sitting with him for the next eight hours and being there when he took his last breath.
That was a bit of a shock. It wasn't completely unexpected because he had health issues, but it wasn't expected at that time. We all thought he had a couple more years in him, and this came about two and a half years after losing my mother very suddenly. Why am I talking about this? Well, today I wanted to share with you a tool that you may not be aware of and I think is important because death is the only certainty that we have in life.
Unfortunately, it can come out of nowhere as it did for me with my mother and then to a lesser extent with my father this time four years ago. One of the things that I've recently discovered, and I've been sharing it with everyone that I can, is that if you have a smartphone in particular, if you have an iPhone, Apple actually will own kind of your data or make it hard for somebody else to access your phone, your photos, your passwords.
If you die suddenly unless you have created a legacy contact within your phone. I think this is something that they should have front and centre when you get an Apple product or an iPhone. But it seems to be something that literally when I've talked about it with anyone and everyone, they're like, I had no idea about this. You might think, why is this on a business podcast? A lot of time people are creating and running businesses from their phones.
If something was God forbid to happen to you, you would want to know that that information is all safe secure and private and is being then given to somebody else who can manage it or take over. Having lost both my mom and my dad, none of these things were in place. It can make it quite difficult to then be able to action things or remove things or even just get into certain things and check things.
The legacy contact, that's what it's called on your phone. I'm sure if you don't have an iPhone, you have another smartphone that may have something similar, but on your iPhone, it's very easy to change. You go to settings, then you tap your name, then tap sign in and security, then you tap legacy contact. Now here you can add a legacy contact and you might need to authenticate this with your face ID or touch password or whatever. But you can create a legacy contact. For me, I have made sure that somebody very close to me is my legacy contact. That person doesn't need to have an Apple ID, but they need to have a phone number. You need to have your phone numbers, and their phone number stored in your phone so you can add them as a contact.
What happens is that once you have that done, you'll be given a QR code and you can then put that in with your will. If you have a business, if you are alive today, you should have a will. You can put that in with the will so that it's obvious whoever is going to become your legacy contact. What happens is that they then use the QR code and they are given almost like a temporary Apple ID, a separate one to yours by Apple, because you have nominated them as that legacy contact and then they have access to most of your stuff.
It just makes it the process of grieving after somebody has passed away that is close to you is just horrendous. It is made more horrendous in a way by tedious admin and not being able to get into things that you need to get into proof and all sorts of things that just there's so much red tape and paperwork that needs to happen after somebody passes away and people don't talk about that enough and talk about how to make that easier on somebody.
I know, again, kind of going off on a tangent, but a lot of the time you get flowers and you get all these lovely things sent and it's very appreciated. But sometimes you just want somebody to sit with you and do the hard things, like the tedious work of paperwork and getting through things. I would imagine that if you were in a business partnership with somebody, that would be even more difficult and you just don't want to be in that situation. If you can change this by doing such a simple thing as adding a legacy contact to your phone, it is potentially going to help other people who are left behind. We all don't want to think about this. I think a lot of people don't want to think about this stuff, but it is reality. People do die and die suddenly, and people die of all sorts of ages, unfortunately.
You want to set this up for yourself. If you're on your iPhone or iPad you can do this. You go to settings, then you tap your name, you tap sign in and security, then you tap Legacy contact, and then you add your legacy contact. As I said, you might be asked to authenticate with the face ID or Touch ID or whatever your device password is. You can also do this on your map. You can go to Apple Menu and then system settings. Then you click your Apple ID again, you click through sign-in and security, then click legacy contact, and then add the legacy contact. This is important to choose someone whom you trust to have access to all the data in your account after your death.
I know this is not necessarily the funniest topic, but I wanted to raise it. It is the fourth anniversary of my dad. I miss him every single day as I do my mom. They were incredible parents. I just think that sharing these things and talking about these things can be super helpful and we don't always talk about them. That is it for today's quick tip episode, just thinking about your legacy and your contact because we are living in a digital world. We're living in a world where our data is important to who we are, what we do and how we live our lives. You want to make sure that data is going somewhere you trust after you pass away. Hopefully, that doesn't happen for any of us for a long time.
If you want to go through that in text format, you can always find the show notes for this at my daily business.com/podcast/371. You might want to share that with family or friends, or if you have aging parents or grandparents or older family members, you may want to work with them on their phone to make sure that their data is accessible to somebody that they trust afterwards. That may be a lawyer, it might be they might give it to their attorney or people who have the power of attorney for them. But I think these are discussions that we all need to have. Thank you so much for reading, and I'll see you next time. Bye.
