Jonathan Hall Uncovers: Password protection

We spend hours in front of the computer emailing, paying bills, checking bank accounts, updating Twitter and Facebook.

Michael Gold, online account holder
"I've got 45 online accounts from subscriptions to my online emails to the Facebooks to the MySpaces."

And we love to shop online.

Our personal information and our credit cards numbers are out there...

Michael Gold, online account holder
"I have 17 accounts."

...and most of us try to come up with creative secret passwords to protect our accounts and our identity.

Michael Gold, online account holder
"Most of my things, mostly bills, car insurance, I don't even know what my password is."

But hardly anyone considers what happens to all those accounts if we suddenly die.

Jeremy Toeman found out firsthand how difficult it is to unlock his grandmother's online information when she passed away.

Jeremy Toeman, Legacy Locker founder
"When she died we were unable to get into her Hotmail account and find out who are some of the friends she might have had that we might not have known about."

Without the right user id and password, you can forget about signing on to a secure online account, even if you can prove it belonged to a close relative who has died.

Jeremy was so frustrated by his grandmother's case that he created a website called Legacy Locker.

Jeremy Toeman, Legacy Locker founder
"It's a place where you can entrust all of your digital assets so that someone can get access to them in the event of your passing."

For $30 a year or $300 for a lifetime membership, you can make a secure will for your online accounts.

Members input their usernames and passwords, and then, just like a regular will, they select beneficiaries for each account.

When you die, it gives that information to the people you designated.

Michael and Susana are getting married in November. Taking care of their online accounts gave them peace of mind.

Michael Gold, online account holder
"It really covers a lot of different ways that you can set up your assets."

That's especially true for automatic bill pay or online accounts where money is deducted from your bank account every month.

If you die, you'd want somebody to be able to access the accounts and shut them down.

It may sound morbid, but as more people do more on line, to avoid a web of trouble, it just makes sense to make password protection part of your planning.

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