If someone dies, how does the person’s family cancel subscriptions like Netflix or Spotify if they don’t have access to the person’s e-mail?
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Talk to the bank or credit card company to notify them of the death. They will need a copy of the death certificate. That will stop all automatic payments coming out of the bank account and the services will be turned off from nonpayment
You can ask for a death certificate that is a legel document and proof of death. Most services will just cancel the account if you call and inform that the person in question has passed no questions asked, if not, you send the document.
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When my dad died unexpectedly we managed to do this because we had an iPad logged into his email. For every other account we chose the “forgot password link”. The sad part is my dad had stored every password in the cloud and a week prior had mentioned this to my mom and aunt, including sharing the password to his cloud account with them. For some reason neither of them thought to write it down anywhere.
You can contact any company and report someone is deceased. You have to provide documents usually, copy of a death certificate and in some cases you have to be the legally appointed executor. If that’s not the way you want to go, you just stop paying or the payments stop when credit cards or bank accounts are closed out. Companies can’t send deceased accounts to collections.
When my dad died in 2007, he had the mail in kind of Netflix, but my mom was also on the account, so they just let her cancel it.
One interesting thing was he had a credit card with about $5k on it. He had more than enough money to pay that off, but he died o Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, which is human spongiform encephalopathy, not to be confused with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (Mad Cow Disease). He had run up that total buying old postcards and graded coins on eBay. I called the credit card company, gave them the death certificate information, and they asked me to mail them a copy. About 2 weeks go by and we get a letter from them saying that the account is closed (my mom wasn’t on this one) and that the balance was zero and we had no need to pay anything from his estate. If my mom had been on the account, she would’ve had to have paid it. I don’t know if that’s normal, but we were very happy to get the letter since his hospital bill was $278k for 45 days in two different hospitals (he died at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta (Druid Hills).
However, a month after he died, we call Emory and ask them when we could expect a bill so we could come up with a plan for how to pay it off and how much they would want each month and for how long. Nope, they told us that since he had died they would just write off the debt.
My mom had expected to have to mortgage the house to pay the debt.
I’m not sure if this helps, but I’m missing him pretty bad tonight, and I just needed to type this out. Even thought it’s been 13 years, the task of mourning someone you truly love diminishes, but is never extinguished.
This is better in r/answers.
Certified, return signature letter containing a copy of the death certificate, a document proving you are the executor of the estate and instructions to cancel the subscription.
The other posters have given good tips. I would say calling is the best method if you do have the information they used on the account such as credit card and name/address. If you have the email name used to make the account, that’s even better. If it’s a joint account, then having the other account holder call is usually good too.
But as far as prevention, I would use lastpass or another password manager and simply leave the master password with things people will only go through if you’re dead like your locked important documents drawer or a safe deposit box. Obviously this is not 100% secure as someone could find it. But, in theory you could add only the accounts with subscriptions’ passwords and not the password to the email account used to make them which is safer. You could take it a step further and use a separate email for these accounts and leave that password as well.
It’s a bit of trouble to set up, but it is easy to maintain. It’s an easy but secure (ie no re-used passwords) method that isn’t too complicated for your relatives to access.
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