Your Family Can’t Access Your Phone When You Die (Ep. 352)

"So many people underestimate what the mourning process is. They underestimate all the things that have to be done after they lose a loved one. And it's not a minor underestimating, it is a major, major underestimating. If you are an entrepreneur listening to this — and obviously you are, if you farm, you have your own business — who are you buying seed from? Fertilizer, chemical, cattle feed. Who's your agronomist? Does your spouse have all that information?"

Hello and welcome back to the podcast. Thank you very much for being here. I appreciate it. You know what, if you guys like the podcast and you have something to share, or you like what I have to say and you want to share it — I guess is how I should say that — and if you would share this with your friends, if you would leave me a five star review, that would be fantastic, because apparently it helps is what they say.

All right. Today we are not gonna talk about infinite banking, but we are going to talk about death. Because, you know, they sort of go hand in hand.

I posted just a PSA, a simple little public service announcement, on TikTok and said, hey, just so you guys know, when you pass away, something to think about is your loved ones are going to see what was on your phone.

Holy moly. You would think — like, I posted that weeks ago, probably even almost a month ago already, and you would think that I have broken the internet, according to my page standards. The amount of comments is crazy. The amount of people that have viewed it is crazy. But the type of comment is very disturbing to me.

And so here's another PSA, something for you guys to think about when you pass away, okay? Because we are going to — it's not a matter of if. When you pass away, right? Because you will pass away. So when you pass away, your loved ones are going to need to get into your phone. They're not going to go into your phone to be nosy. However, they'll probably look around, because it's human nature. And what they find could be great, or what they find could be even more disturbing.

The comments were saying, well, they're not gonna have my passcode. Nobody's gonna let them in. Well, Mr. Smarty Pants, let me share with you that, yeah, they can't get in without your passcode, but guess what? There are places that you have gone on your phone. Like maybe it's your banking information. Maybe it's your car insurance information. Maybe your boss's phone number. They need friends' phone numbers, people you are doing business with. People are gonna be calling that phone because they don't know you're dead. There's gonna be second code verifications that get sent to your phone. There's going to be all sorts of things that they need to get into that phone for.

I can understand if you are a grown adult and you are not sharing the code with your family. Like, I get it. Their phone really has nothing to do with you. But if you're a single adult and you are not writing that down somewhere, they can't get in your phone.

So here's an example. I have a friend whose son was killed in a car accident. They didn't know if he had life insurance, because he was a grown adult, but he was single. So he was, like, late twenties. No idea if he had life insurance, no idea how to get into his phone to even see who his car insurance company was.

He should have probably had it in the glove compartment. But so many people nowadays take a picture. The cops are okay with a picture. They use that information, whatever. Sometimes you don't even have to have your driver's license on you. Like, I watch all these traffic stop things online, of these cops doing traffic stops. Yeah, I know it's a little weird, but I just can't believe how dumb people are. Anyway, so they will take a picture of their license and they don't even have their actual license on them, which is very strange. But people live through their phone.

And so when you are talking about — I recently just lost my marketing guy that did a lot of my Facebook ad stuff, and he had a lot of two-code stuff set up to go to him so he wouldn't have to go through me, 'cause I'm busy and in meetings all day. And so it's taken some time, and we're still not through all of it — getting it from his spouse and having her give us the code so we can get our stuff fixed on our side. It's not like somebody passes away and then it's just easy peasy, no big deal.

Now, if your spouse has a flip phone, okay. If your spouse doesn't ever do anything with passwords or emails or paying bills or anything like that, okay, maybe you're fine. But there is something that you are doing, ordering on your phone, that your spouse does not. They're going to need access to that phone.

There are people online that are saying, I don't care what they find, I am dead. So if you are cheating on your spouse, if you are looking at inappropriate things online, if you are doing any of that stuff that your spouse does not know about, or your loved ones do not know about — and they have to get into your phone because they need to cancel things or they need to find things, and they see those things. Is that the last image you want them to have of you?

And the fact that so many people are saying, I don't care what they see, or I don't care what they think, I am dead. I would hope that that's just a young person, ignorant comment. I'm not looking up these people to see who they are. Why would I waste my time on somebody that comments like that? Not looking. Thank you for driving my algorithm with your ignorance is basically where I'm at in this scenario.

Because I have experienced delivering death claims. It doesn't matter if it's a spouse, if it's a kid, it does not matter. I have experienced delivering death claims and things being found on their phone that now they're not just mourning your death, but they are mourning who you were. Because if you are cheating on your spouse and they now find this later — I just can't even imagine what the toll of that would be after they pay to bury you. Like, I'd be so mad. I'd be like, I'm not paying to bury him. His mom and dad can pay to bury him if he's gonna be cheating on me. Right. Like, what the hell?

And the first thing you're gonna probably do is go through their phone. 'Cause if you weren't with them, what were they doing last? Who do we need to notify? I might need to get into their phone so that I can call their boss.

I know Scott's password to his phone. I'm in it all the time. If he's driving, he'll be like, "Hey, I got a text," and he'll throw me the phone and I'll answer for him. I can go into his phone for whatever reason. Scott is not techie. Okay. Scott can barely use his own phone. Barely use his own phone. So if I died, does he know my password? I don't know. I'm not hiding it. But I don't know if he actually knows it. My daughter knows it. So she would be able to get into my phone and help her father, 'cause she knows the passcode.

But it's so disheartening to me that people don't think. It was a simple PSA, a simple note to say, hey, watch what you're doing on your phone, because you don't wanna hurt your loved ones after you're gone. The amount of people that have just responded with absolute coldness is amazing. I mean, I would hope that none of these people are married. I would hope that none of them have children. If you don't care enough to care today of what they're gonna think when you pass, you don't deserve them. In my opinion.

So many people underestimate what the mourning process is. They underestimate all the things that have to be done after they lose a loved one. And it's not a minor underestimating, it is a major, major underestimating.

The fact that my marketing guy passed away — and it was sudden. I mean, he had been sick, but it was sudden. The fact that he passed away, and all the things that affected people's lives outside of his spouse's. I underestimated, 'cause I've never had someone that I've hired pass away. I've only ever had family pass away, or friends pass away, clients pass away — but not someone that I had hired that worked for me, not somebody that was an entrepreneur that I have been close enough to that I can see what's happening kind of on the back end.

If you are an entrepreneur listening to this — and obviously you are, if you farm, because you have your own business — who are you buying seed from? Fertilizer, chemical, cattle feed. Who's your agronomist? Does your spouse have all that information?

The people that I talk to on a daily basis — my main marketing guy, John, Teresa, Jess, Tiara, the people in my office. Scott does not have their information in his phone. He is not going to know their phone numbers. I don't have them written down in a book, because they're in my phone. All he needs to know is my passcode.

So if you think, well, I don't need any of this — okay. Who's the banker? If you have a banker, do you have the banker's information? Do you have the John Deere dealership's information? The Case — I don't care who the dealership is. If we're leasing a piece of equipment, or if we owe money on a piece of equipment that's not financed through the bank. What if we owe John Deere Financial some money? Do we know how to get ahold of John Deere Financial?

If everything is online and there's a code that's coming through — you can't just call and talk to people nowadays. Like, we can't even talk to people that are not beneficiaries of a policy. So if somebody passes away and their other family members call, we can't speak to them because they're not the beneficiary of the policy. If mom and dad die, or if dad dies and mom doesn't know anything about the life insurance policy, the kid cannot call the company on behalf of mom. Mom needs to be there and okay that.

We had an incident just recently. I lost a client. The daughter called — she's POA, but I had worked with them before, so I knew it was okay to talk to her. But then one of the other family members called, and I said, we are not releasing information to you because you were not a beneficiary on this policy. My insured did not talk about you enough to where I would feel comfortable releasing that information. Now, had this been the insurance company — had the daughter called the insurance company, they would've absolutely, under no circumstance, talked to her.

So even I have to be careful who I talk to and who I give that information to. Everybody wants a death certificate. You can't close a phone line, I don't believe, without even having a death certificate. So all of these things just take so long. There's so much there that your loved ones and the people around you — you need to have your phone code somewhere. I don't care if you have that notebook of gathered information for everybody. It needs to be somewhere. One of your kids, your spouse, somebody needs to know what it is, and they need to put it in their little noodle. Because the phone companies are not allowing you to get in.

Now, I think that's crazy. My friend whose son was killed in a car accident, she could not take his death certificate to Verizon and get into his phone. That, to me, seems crazy. Like, here's the death certificate. He died. So why are we paying for a phone line? Obviously we need to, until we get everything closed up, but there's information there that we need. It is confidential — it was confidential. But people are keeping everything there, like I said.

Anyway, I just wanted to do a little PSA here, because of the fact that it has gotten to be such a huge topic online. I just thought a couple people are gonna see it, right? And I was kind of being funny about it — just a PSA, watch yourself. And it has blown up to something I literally would've not thought about. I would have never in a million years thought I would've seen the comments I'm seeing. I thought people were gonna say, oh my gosh, I never considered that.

There is a young lady on TikTok, and I cannot remember her name, but she's created this book of getting all your stuff together. And a lot of people have 'em, right? A lot of estate planners have 'em. Here's your little book of how to write all your stuff in. And that's great. But most things could possibly be found. Like, most people aren't gonna be that organized. Let's just be honest. Like, you can't even get people to keep their finances in order, much less keep their life in order.

And so even I'm not that organized, but I do have major passwords written out. They know how to get into my phone. Like, it's gonna be kind of messy. As much as I would love to say, oh, life will be fantastic and everything will be clean for them — that's not the case. You know, we've had the conversation of this is who you need to talk to, this is what you need to do. But great, Scott, you need to call Jess, but you don't have Jess's number. He knows where she lives, so he's gonna have to drive there.

Yeah. It's just a lot of stuff that we don't think about. This being probably one of the more major things.

So if you have stupid, ignorant comments like they do online — please don't. Please don't leave them anywhere you're listening to this, because I just can't even fathom how little you care about your family to even comment like that. So please don't comment that. But if you have had experiences of how hard this is after you've lost somebody, I think those comments would be super helpful, just so people understand what that's like, or what they can do to kind of get around and navigate some of those things. That would be super helpful.

Okay, that's all I got on that.

If you are a client, here's another little announcement. If you are an existing client, mark your calendars for January 13th and 14th, Chandler, Arizona. We are doing our client-only Black Sheep Summit, and so you have already gotten the save-the-date for that, but just mark your calendars. We have amazing speakers.

One of the big, huge ones — I like to always bring somebody really, really good in, and that is gonna be Coffey Anderson. He is a self-published album singer. I don't know how to say that, I should probably find out. He does not have a record deal. He has just done his own records. He is amazing. Amazing story of resilience, and he just lost his wife to cancer and has little kids, and it's just gonna be an amazing presentation. So mark your calendars for that in 2027.

All right you guys, that's all I got. You have a fantastic rest of your day.