What families actually go through.

We’re in beta, building a collection of real stories from real families. In early conversations, we hear the same things over and over. The unexpected loss. The months of hunting through accounts. The subscriptions that kept billing. The passwords no one knew.

These are composite stories built from those conversations. The details are illustrative, but the experiences are real.

We’ll continue adding stories from real families as our beta grows. If you’ve had an experience you’d like to share, we’d love to hear from you.

"We thought we had maybe 20 accounts. We had 67."

67 accountsdiscovered on a Sunday afternoon - just between two people

The Torres family decided to build their Holograph together - a Sunday afternoon project. They started with the obvious: wills, advance health directives, insurance policies, bank accounts. Then they got to their online life: social media, email, streaming, subscriptions, shopping accounts, rewards programs. An hour in, they had 67 accounts.

"You don’t notice them building up. Every app, every service, every subscription you forget to cancel - it all accumulates. And none of it goes anywhere when you die. It just stays there. Billing. Sitting. Waiting for someone to deal with it."

Now every account has an instruction. Their childrens’ guardian is listed as a Principal. She knows where to look.

"We had no idea what we were looking for."

5 monthspiecing together the full picture - and one account still isn’t resolved

Chelsea’s husband passed suddenly, but they were prepared - or so she thought. She had the will. She knew the bank accounts. She thought she understood their finances.

What she hadn’t accounted for was the digital sprawl. Amazon. Netflix. A gym membership he hadn’t used in two years. A cloud storage account she’d never heard of, still billing $9.99 a month. A PayPal account with a balance she found four months later.

"Every week, something else would show up on the credit card statement. I just wanted it to be over - but every time I thought I was done, there was another one."

Some accounts required a death certificate and a notarized letter just to close. Others were impossible to access without his password. One still isn’t resolved.

"There was $31,000 in an account none of us knew about."

$31,000in a forgotten 401(k) - with the wrong beneficiary on file

Jamal had changed jobs three times in fifteen years. Each time, he meant to roll his old retirement account into the new one. He never got around to it. When he died, the 401(k) from his first job - opened in 2009 - wasn’t in any of their documents. He had simply forgotten it existed.

Sarah found out fourteen months later, when a letter arrived from the plan administrator. The account had $31,000 in it. The harder discovery: the beneficiary Jamal had listed in his twenties was his mother, who had since passed. He’d never updated it, and the account went to probate.

"We got the money eventually eight months later, after legal fees and a probate proceeding we were completely unprepared for. The hard part wasn’t the money. It was doing all of that while we were still grieving."

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