Have You Secured Your Backup Plan?

I'm going to assume that most people on Steemit are into cryptocurrency. Just about anybody that has been putting their respective fiat into the new Wild West markets of investing for more than four months has seen pretty good returns. It doesn't really matter what you have bought, the returns are high pretty much across the board.

Sometimes we get so caught up in day to day life and watching the value of our virtual stacks grow we don't even think about the what ifs. The biggest what if of all is this... What if you die tomorrow?

The future isn't certain. No matter where you live, if you watch the news you see stories of fatal car accidents, house fires, acts of nature, etc. There are so many people that die before their time by accidents, and there's nothing they could do to prevent it.

What if you're sitting on $5,000, $10,000 or even more worth of cryptocurrency and something happens to you? It's not something I really thought about too much until the past couple of days. Usually I spend my free time here on Steemit because I enjoy it more than Reddit or any of the other social media apps we have all come accustomed to, but the past few days the majority of my time has been spent writing out detailed instructions just in case something happens to me. Here's what I did.

First I went to the store and picked up two USB flash drives. They aren't expensive. I think I spent less than $20 for two. Now whether you get one or two or ten is completely up to you. I chose to get two simply because of the amount of USD$ that I have in value. I made two identical copies on each drive. Things you need to think about putting on these drives

• wallet backups
• pass phrases
• passwords (ecxhange passwords, Coinbase, email, anything you can think of)
• private keys
• a list of different wallets you have value in
• detailed instructions of what to do with all of this information

Now copying and pasting passwords and private keys is pretty easy. Making detailed instructions for somebody that has no clue what to do and isn't computer savvy, is not.

The next thing I did is make a list. I have multiple wallets on my laptop, one on my phone, exchanges, Steemit, paper wallets, and shares in a Dash masternode. Take your time. The last thing you want to do is rush through this and end up forgetting an important step. After you write your instructions for that first wallet, go through step-by-step and see if what you type is making sense. In most cases you will have to send from a wallet to an exchange, then from the exchange to your favorite fiat cash out location. Even better is if you have a loved one go through it with you so they can ask questions that you might not have thought of.

Don't forget to explain 2 Factor Authentication if you use it. This is a step that I missed when explaining how to get everything off of my Bittrex account.

My wife understands a little about crypto. I've been talking to her about it for about a year now and she is accepting of the fact that I'm going to be putting our hard earned money into it. She didn't have many questions and, quite surprisingly, she had the answers for most of the questions I asked her.

There were a few things that she didn't understand. Powering down on Steemit didn't make sense to her but she understood the concept. Withdraw limits was another one that she didn't get. Again, once explained she understood, just couldn't grasp the why. It actually got her more interested in what I do and where I'm putting our money, which is always a good thing! She even came up with idea to print out private keys and pass phrases on paper and laminating them in the event of water damaging the flash drives.

Please, please if you have loved ones that could benefit from your crypto stack in the event of your death, do something to ensure they can cash out.

Resteem this, rewrite it and blog it yourself. Just get the idea out there.