alt Hacker NewsShow HN: LastShelf – an emergency map of your family's documents bills& contacts
After my father was diagnosed with Stage 3 kidney cancer, my family was thrown into a tailspin. Getting second opinions, planning surgery, ensuring insurance coverage, coping with the fear. It was a lot to process.
In the middle of dealing with all the medical logistics, I realized none of our family could answer if he: - Had a medical directive? - How to trigger his life insurance policy? - Where is his will and who is the executor? - What bank accounts and credit cards existed? - What bills are not on auto-pay? - When these bills due and how are they paid?
That wasn’t solved by password managers or budgeting apps. So I built it.
LastShelf: automatically discovers, documents and distributes a map of critical life documents, expenses & contacts in the event of an emergency. Register here: https://www.lastshelf.ai/
If you’ve lived through a similar crisis, I really want to hear what would have made the process easier.
Anyone who shares their feedback with me will get the first year free. Send a note to support [at] lastshelf.ai
Comments
One thing that I couldn't understand from the website: how is this triggered?
This sounds useful, but I also want an automated way to distribute the information when needed. Maybe a dead man's switch of sorts?
For example, suppose I'm a single adult, and I set this all up. Then I go for a hike and disappear forever. How can the trigger of distribution happen?
My experience estate planning is that there are a lot of sensitive details in the documents. The tried a true method is the estate planning binder. Typically there is a worksheet to guide with the collection of information and then trusted parties review and find the missing details and then also work through the complex planning part. LLMs have, this far, not been good at that.
In the last 20 that I've done the biggest hurdle has been sitting down to do the work. A smarter worksheet doesn't solve the human problem of: "I'll get to this later".
Another critical part this doesn't handle is having a trusted party to help during the shit storm. Your estate lawyer and/or executor provide more than organized data.
a hundred dollars a year for this?? What does the service even do with that money? I pay this for 20 years so you can share a google doc upon my demise?
I must be missing something.
Having dealt with this with a couple of family members, set it a similar system for my spouse and I, and also been tech support for numerous friends doing somethign similar I'll provide a couple notes
* The biggest product market fit note to me is that this misunderstands the information access challenge. My experience has been that you are on 'step 2' of the information - organizing it and accessing it. Step 1 is getting the information out of the person, all of it, correctly, willingly. These are hard conversations and structuring them is less of a challenge than the emotional piece.
* In the zero trust/everything is multifactor age what I have really found is that access to cell phone and email are the most critical. I don't see where this prioritizes those...because I won't be able to login to anything of (say) my mom's from my laptop until I have those two things to verify identity.
* I can't quite tell whether you are pitching this at 'healthy people to set this up for the future' (a nonstarter because of annual subscription cost) or 'healthy person helping sick family member' (they have enough going on that starting using a new piece of software is an unsustainable cognitive load delta no matter the ease).
Big picture...what I recommend for friends and family is a password manager with a deadmans switch someone else (your estate personal rep) can trigger. That, plus good estate planning is basically sufficient. You should (and almost always can) have some document in there listing major accounts nad bills that is mostly up to date. This stuff doesn't have to be perfect it just needs to be good enough because no matter why you are activating it perfect is not going to be an option or even helpful.
Love this - awesome release.
I have a keepass file that I keep fairly updated on multiple places, my phone being up to date.
A trusted family member has its password which is in their keepass.
In the event I am not around, I expect them to find the password and open the keepass.
Its less complicated this way
uhhhh why yes, i would love to give a vibecoded app access to all of my important information so it can stored for "safe" keeping... a post it note on your front door would be more secure and likely last longer.
Critical stuff like this is definitely a good idea to delegate to an LLM.