Tammi is a combat medic in the U.S. Marine Corps. She has a 2-year old boy, Erin, and a husband, Jake, who is also in the Marine Corps. Because either she or her husband could be called up at any time, she knows it’s critical that her family, including her parents, have an organized, central access point for all the information they would need if something happened to her such as her bill pay service, her insurance, what to do with her social media accounts, location of the titles to their cars, how to collect her military funeral benefits and honors, and so many other things. She’d also like a place to keep all the digital keepsakes for her son as he grows up: photos, messages, savings accounts.
AfterVault is the solution to Tammi’s situation. It’s a secure, encrypted online vault for organizing and storing your vital information that also assures your information is delivered to those who need it.
To get a good idea of how AfterVault is used, let’s follow our Marine medic, Tammi, as she creates a vault for her husband, Jake.
After Tami logs in to AfterVault, she sees her dashboard.
There are three sections on her dashboard: Alert Rules, Your Vaults, and Guardian Vaults.
- Alert Rules are where she will tell AfterVault how to check on her wellness in order to determine when to send an email to her parents or husband. We’ll talk about this more later.
- Your Vaults allows Tammi to create a new vault. If she already had vaults, they would show as a list in this section.
- Guardian Vaults is where she can view the list of vaults for which she is a guardian. In Tammi’s case, we can see that someone has created a vault for Tammi and named it Tammi Open Vault. In this case, they have allowed her to view the contents. Her husband created this vault and assigned her to be the guardian.
Tammi is here to create a vault for her husband so she presses ‘Create New Vault’ then names the vault and enters her husband’s email address.
After she presses ‘Create’, the main Vault screen appears. Now she can see all the categories AfterVault has supplied for her to organize her vital information. Today, Tammi is just going to fill out a few categories that are most important to her. Today Tammi will attach a will and also tell Jake what to do with her Facebook and Twitter accounts.
Tammi knows that her will is the most important piece of information Jake will need, so she starts there by clicking on the ‘Will and Testament’ tab on the far left of the screen. She is presented with an ‘Add Will’ button.
Tammi presses the ‘Add Will’ button, enters her lawyer’s name and contact information and, because she has a soft copy of the will on her PC, she uploads it into AfterVault.
After pressing ‘Save’, she sees a new line added to the Will and Testament section of her vault. She can continue to add more lines if she has more wills or documents to add for this category.
But now Tammi would like to add her social media information so she finds the social media tab and presses it to see this:
After Tammi has added both Facebook and Twitter, she sees two lines, one for each social media site, in her Social Media vault section.
That’s all Tammi wants to enter for now but there are a couple more things she really needs to do in order to make her vault useful. On the Vault Essentials screen, she has specified who is to get this information. Her husband. That’s not quite enough. So far, he doesn’t know that she’s made a vault for him and he can’t see anything she has put in the vault. She takes another look at the Vault Essentials screen.
Under her Guardian information, she sees two buttons. One button will send an invitation to her selected guardian, Jake. Tammi presses ‘Send Invitation’ and off goes an email to Jake telling him that Tammi has created a vault for him and inviting him to create his own completely free account so that he can access that vault when the time is right.
Tammi’s vault will not be visible to Jake unless one of two things happen:
- She presses the ‘Reveal to guardian’ button.
- She fails to respond to her Alert Rules. We’ll talk about this in a moment.
In this case, there is nothing in this vault Tammi wants kept secret until after her death so she presses the ‘Reveal to Guardian’ button so Jake can immediately view everything she has put into this particular vault. Tammi might well create a second vault and call it ‘Jake Closed Vault’ and although Jake will know this vault has been created for him he will not be able to see the contents until Tammi fails to respond to her Alert Rules.
Once Tammi has pressed these two buttons, the screen looks like this:
Notice that by pressing the ‘Hide from guardian’ button, Tammi can turn off Jake’s access to this vault.
Now let’s talk about Alert Rules. Alert Rules are a feature unique to AfterVault. They are not for everyone but for many of our customers they are the feature they most love about AfterVault.
Alert Rules are a way for AfterVault to determine if you are no longer able to take care of your own affairs whether through death or through severe incapacitation. How do we do that? We send you a customized protocol of emails and text messages that request that you respond either though a text message reply or by clicking a confirmation link. You determine what kind of message is sent when. If you fail to respond to three of these wellness ‘pings’, we will contact your guardian to see if something has happened to you.
Here’s the screen where you set up your Alert Rules.
First Tammi notices that she’ll need to verify her phone number before she can use text message. She presses ‘Verify Phone Number’ and follows the simple instructions asking her to type in the code sent to her as a text message. Now she can use text messages.
For Tammi, she checks her email often often that she doesn’t mind being checked on every couple of days so she sets here regular check-in to 2 days and keeps it as an email check. But if she doesn’t respond to her regular check-in, she wants her first fail-safe to be a text message sent to her a day after she failed to respond to the email. And then one more a day later and finally she’d like AfterVault to wait a single day before asking her guardian about her wellness and allowing access to that vault.
When she’s done, her Alert Rules screen looks like this.
Now Tammi has one more thing to do before she is done. She must turn on her Alert Rules or they will not be active for her account. She goes back to her Dashboard by pressing the ‘Dashboard’ button and there in the Alert Rules section, she switches on the
And now Tammi’s will and social media is taken care of. She has more work to do to be sure all the information gets to the right people. She’ll be adding her insurance, bill pay, and health directives to Jake’s open vault. But she’ll also create a new vault for Jake that won’t open for him unless something happens to Tammi. She’ll put a message for him in the Vault Essentials screen. She also has some photos she thinks will have meaning for him and that she would like as part of her memorial. These are things she’d rather keep private until a time when they would be more meaningful.
She’ll also make a closed vault for her two-year old son, Erin. To start with, she’ll just put photos in that vault but as time goes by she hopes to add more things that will be useful or have sentimental value for Erin when, hopefully many years from now, Tammi is no longer with him.
You can try out AfterVault completely free to see if it would be useful for you. Why not try it out? It really is one of the most important things you can do to keep you family secure in possibly the most emotional and trying experience they will have in their lives. Try AfterVault for free today.