What Goes in Recipients

Created by IronClad Family Support, Modified on Tue, Jul 28 at 11:15 AM by IronClad Family Support

Recipients are the people who will receive your vaults when your delivery conditions are met — your spouse, your children, an executor, a trusted friend. You add them here first, then attach them to whichever vaults they should receive.

One subcategory lives here: Recipients. Add a separate record for each person.

New to how the forms work? Start with Understanding the Forms.

The recipient form

Their name (required)
Who are they to you? — spouse or partner, child, parent, sibling, attorney, financial advisor, friend, other
Email and phone
Security question and answer — what the recipient answers to unlock the vault at delivery

Get the email and phone exactly right: wrong contact details are the number one reason a delivery fails, and it fails at the one moment nobody can fix it — when the vault is releasing and you're not there. Use a personal email rather than a work one; work addresses vanish when someone changes jobs, and these vaults may wait years before they're needed.

Choose a security question with a stable, unambiguous answer: “What street did we grow up on?” works. “What's my favorite restaurant?” doesn't — favorites change, and so does someone's memory of them under stress. Avoid answers that could be typed several ways, like dates or names with a middle initial. And tell the recipient the answer in advance: this is the key to the vault, and it does no good if the one person who needs it doesn't know it.

Adding recipients is only the first half

Creating a recipient here doesn't send them anything on its own. Recipients belong to vaults — you attach a recipient to a vault, and they receive whatever records you've assigned to it.

So the full picture is: add the person here, attach them to the right vault, and assign your records to that vault. Miss any of the three and something doesn't reach them.

A vault's people see everything in it. There's no way to share one record but not another with the same recipient — access happens at the vault level. If you want one person to see some things and not others, that's two vaults. Vaults are unlimited, so make as many as the situation needs.

Keeping recipients current

Contact details go stale faster than anything else in your vault. Revisit your recipients at least once a year, and whenever someone moves, changes their number, or changes their email — a recipient with an out-of-date address is a delivery that quietly won't arrive.

What Goes in Recipients

The recipient form

Adding recipients is only the first half

Keeping recipients current

Related Articles