Do you trust your spouse? If you’ve been married for decades, the answer is probably “yes” or you wouldn’t still be married. Still, there are different levels of trust. Even in a strong marriage, individuals value their privacy. They might not want a spouse to access a bank account and discover that they fibbed about the price of a recent purchase. They might worry that a spouse will criticize their investment decisions after scrutinizing their Charles Schwab account.

Trust issues tend to be heightened when spouses talk about passwords. Spouses might or might not share passwords to smartphones or laptops. They might view a request for a password as a sign that their spouse doesn’t trust them. For a variety of reasons, many spouses decline to share their passwords to electronic devices, online accounts, or social media platforms.

There comes a time when trust issues — or any other cause of reticence about sharing passwords — needs to be set aside. While it is unpleasant to plan for death, spouses do so routinely by making estate plans. They trust each other to make important end-of-life decisions when they execute living wills. To avoid complications that will only make life more difficult for the surviving spouse, the same level of trust needs to extend to passwords that provide access to financial accounts.

The Risk of Being Overwhelmed

The story of Alice Stone Nakhimovsky illustrates the importance of sharing financial information. Alice is a retired university professor and the author of almost a dozen books, but financial management was not her strength. Alice’s husband (a professor of computer science and linguistics) managed the family finances. When he died unexpectedly at the age of 80, Alice struggled to understand the spreadsheets he used to keep track of assets and debts.

At various times during their marriage, Alice asked her husband to walk her through the family finances. He used a system of his own devising that Alice could not intuitively understand. He tried to explain their investment portfolio, using terms like ETFs and index funds, but when her eyes inevitably glazed over, they decided to put the task off to another day.

Alice knew that her husband had been swindled in a Ponzi scheme a few years before his death. Although they lost $350,000, they still had about a million dollars in investment accounts. As account statements arrived in the mail after her husband’s death, she felt overwhelmed as she tried to piece together the various assets that she had inherited.

Alice eventually found email exchanges between her husband and two professionals he used as investment advisers. She contacted them, chose the one with whom she felt more comfortable, and asked him for help. With his assistance, she consolidated the investment accounts, reallocated stocks and bonds to reduce risk, and rolled over some investments to avoid a huge tax hit.

After about a year, Alice got a handle on the finances. She regrets that she didn’t learn more about her husband’s investment scheme while he was still alive. She wishes she had recorded his explanation of his investment strategy and accounting methods. Her message to other aging couples is the need for preparation. Making sure that each spouse understands the family finances will minimize financial stress and anxiety when one spouse dies.

The Time to Plan Is Now

A request to share passwords should be part of a larger conversation about financial and death planning. That conversation might not seem urgent in the early stages of a marriage, when spouses have no significant assets and anticipate a long life together. Recognizing that death comes on its own schedule, spouses at every stage of a marriage should share information that will make it easier for a surviving spouse to access assets soon after a spouse dies.

As investments grow, sharing passwords becomes even more important. A surviving spouse may have a critical need for funds in the days and weeks following her spouse’s death. Mortgage payments still need to be made and credit card bills still need to be paid. Funerals are expensive. Life insurance proceeds might help, but it may take a couple of months for an insurance company to review claim forms and a death certificate before authorizing payment.

How to Talk About Password Sharing

Financial planner Douglas Boneparth and his wife Heather, authors of the book Money Together, encourage couples to have equal involvement in their family’s finances. A spouse who is uninformed about the couple’s assets and does not know how to access that information should take proactive steps to prepare for the other spouse’s death.

The Boneparths recommend that a spouse who isn’t involved in family finances approach the topic in a “low-threat” manner. Opening the conversation with a demand — “I need all your passwords” — might be met with knee-jerk resistance. A better opening would focus on the need to ease worries about the future. “‘If something happened to you, I’m concerned I wouldn’t know where everything is” is less likely to trigger a defensive response.

The Boneparths also offer cogent advice to facilitate death planning:

• Don’t put it off. Death does not arrive on a predictable schedule. As Alice Stone Nakhimovsky discovered, delaying or postponing the task of mastering the family’s finances might leave a spouse unprepared to assume management of financial affairs after an unexpected death.
• Authorize account access. Even if spouses share a joint account, bank documents might show one spouse as the primary account holder. Make sure that both spouses have equal authority to manage joint accounts after a spouse dies.
• Document financial information. Make a list of financial accounts and other assets held by each spouse, whether jointly or separately. Update that list annually. Include passwords to each account and, whenever a password is changed, update the list immediately. Store the list in a secure place and make sure that both spouses know how to access it.
• Give practical advice. The spouse who has traditionally managed finances should explain in detail the tasks that he routinely performs. Explain how money is transferred from one account to another, how to buy and sell stocks in an investment account, how to identify accounts from which withdrawals can be made without tax consequences, and how to calculate mandatory annual withdrawals from tax-deferred accounts.

Spouses should renew the conversation regularly. Learning about financial management isn’t easy, particularly when a spouse who has no interest in the subject has always counted on her partner to handle investments. Sit down at least once a year and review the steps that need to be taken if a spouse dies. Consider inviting responsible adult children to one of the meetings so the surviving spouse will have another shoulder to lean on while transitioning to a new role.