u/Pristine_Quality1764

Trying to plan ahead here. I have a significant amount on Coinbase I know, not your keys working on moving to cold storage but it's a process.

If something happens to me, what's the actual procedure for my wife to access the account?

I've tried searching Coinbase's help docs and found this: https://help.coinbase.com/en/coinbase/managing-my-account/other/how-do-i-close-a-deceased-persons-account

It says she needs to contact support with a death certificate, proof she's the executor, and government ID.

But I have questions. How long does this process actually take? I've seen horror stories of 6+ month delays. Does Coinbase freeze the account immediately when notified? If I have 2FA set up, does she need access to my phone too? Is there a way to pre authorize her so the process is smoother?

I'm also considering setting up some kind of automated notification system so she even KNOWS to contact Coinbase she's not crypto savvy and might not think to check.

Has anyone here actually been through this process, either as an executor or helping a family member? What was the experience like?

I want to make sure she doesn't lose access to funds because of some bureaucratic nightmare while she's grieving.

Any advice appreciated. Thanks.

I have been stacking sats for 6 years. Cold storage. Not your keys, not your coins. The whole philosophy.

But I just realized something: if I get hit by a bus tomorrow, my wife has zero idea how to access my Bitcoin. She knows I have some crypto but doesn't know where the hardware wallet is, what a seed phrase is or where I keep it, how to restore a wallet, how to send BTC to an exchange, or how to cash out.

I could explain it to her now, but let's be real she'll forget in a year, or I'll change wallets, or whatever.

I have been researching solutions and most are either way too expensive (Casa at $1,200/yr feels steep), require hardware keys (more stuff to lose/break), multisig setups (too complex for a non technical spouse), or just write instructions and hope they find them.

What's the Bitcoin maximalist approved approach here?

I'm genuinely curious what the community does. Multisig with a trusted contact? Timelocked wallet? Just a letter in a safe deposit box?

For now I've been testing out a dead man's switch tool (Heretura - it's basically a dead man's switch for crypto inheritance sends encrypted recovery instructions if I'm unresponsive for months). But curious if there are better approaches I'm missing.

How are you all handling this? Especially if your spouse/kids aren't technical?

Every month I’d download PDFs from different banks, manually go through transactions, categorize everything into Excel, and prepare it for bookkeeping and tax filing.

The worst part wasn’t even the categorization.

It was:

• weird transaction names
• duplicate transfers
• inconsistent formats between banks
• cleaning everything manually before sending it to the accountant

One month I tracked it.

4+ hours gone just organizing statements.

So I started building a small internal workflow that:

• reads PDF bank statements
• extracts transactions
• categorizes them automatically
• exports everything into clean Excel sheets

What started as a personal workflow turned into something other freelancers and small business owners started asking for too.

Still improving accuracy and edge cases, but honestly even the current version saves an insane amount of time.

Curious how other people here handle bookkeeping or admin work like this.

Got a call from a client at 11pm last month.

He runs a CPA firm. 80 clients. 4 staff. 3 days until filing deadline.

His QuickBooks and the IRS portal were showing different numbers across multiple client files. He didn't know which one was right. His team had been manually cross-checking files all week and was exhausted.

I spent that night building a script that compared both systems automatically.

It found mismatches in 9 client files not the 6 he suspected.

One of them had a $34,000 discrepancy that would have gone to the IRS unnecessarily.

I'm an automation consultant and this got me thinking I have since spoken to about a dozen CPA firms and the story is basically the same everywhere:

• Reconciliation is still mostly manual
• Errors get caught by luck more than by system
• The system is usually one exhausted staff member double checking at 11pm

I'm now building an AI tool that does this automatically scans every client file overnight, flags issues before filing, tells you the specific IRS code that applies.

Before I go further genuinely curious:

1. Is this actually how most firms still work or am I seeing an outlier?
2. What's the most painful manual step in your tax workflow right now?
3. Would a morning briefing showing every client issue automatically actually change how you work?

Not selling anything. Still building. Just want to understand if I'm solving the right problem before I go too deep.