A bank account has a built in fallback. If something happens to you, your family can eventually present a death certificate and a court document, and the bank releases the funds. It is slow and bureaucratic, but the path exists because the bank is holding the money and can be compelled to act.
A self-custody wallet has no equivalent. Nobody at Simple Base Swap, or any other self-custody wallet, holds your funds or your recovery phrase. Nobody can reset it, recover it, or release it to anyone on your behalf, court order or not. If you are the only person who knows your recovery phrase and something happens to you, the funds do not go to your family. They simply sit at an address forever, unreachable by anyone, including the people you would have wanted to have them.
This is the tradeoff at the center of self-custody. The same design that keeps a stranger, a hacker, or a company from ever touching your funds also means there is no institution standing by to hand them over later. Planning for that is not a niche concern for large holdings only. It applies to anyone holding real value in a wallet only they can open.
The core tension
The goal is straightforward to state and harder to execute: someone you trust should be able to access your wallet if you become unable to, but nobody, including that person, should be able to access it while you are fine and have not asked them to. Most of the mistakes people make with inheritance planning come from solving only one half of that problem.
Telling one person your full recovery phrase today solves the access problem but gives up your own security while you are alive and well. Telling no one solves the security problem but guarantees the funds are lost the moment you are not there to move them. The practical answer sits between those two extremes, and how far toward each side you lean depends on how much value is at stake.
A few approaches, roughly in order of effort
Written instructions, stored separately from the phrase itself. At a minimum, leave a trusted person or a lawyer a document explaining that a wallet exists, roughly what it holds, and where to find the recovery phrase, without the phrase itself being written in that document. The instructions and the phrase should not sit in the same place. Someone who finds the instructions alone should still need a second discovery to reach the funds.
Splitting the phrase across two locations. Some hardware wallets support splitting a recovery phrase into multiple parts, where no single part is enough to reconstruct it. If your hardware wallet supports this, storing the parts in two separate secure locations, such as a home safe and a bank deposit box, means no single point of failure can either lose the funds or steal them. Our guide to choosing and setting up a hardware wallet covers the backup options a given device offers.
A multisig set up specifically for this. A multisig wallet requires more than one key to approve a transaction, which makes it a natural fit for inheritance. You can hold two of three keys yourself across separate devices, with a third key given to a family member or an estate attorney who cannot move funds alone but can act together with any other surviving keyholder if needed. Our guide to multisig wallets explains how these are typically structured.
Working with an estate attorney who handles digital assets. This is increasingly common, and it does not mean handing your recovery phrase to a lawyer to hold in a filing cabinet. It means having someone with legal authority who understands the plan, can locate the instructions when the time comes, and can help your family follow through correctly. A lawyer can also fold this into a broader estate plan alongside more conventional assets.
What not to do
Do not write a recovery phrase directly into a will. In most places, a will becomes a public record during probate, which means anything written into it is no longer private, including a string of words that grants full access to a wallet.
Do not store the phrase in a cloud note, a password manager synced to your phone, or a photo, even temporarily, for the sake of convenience while you set this up. Those are exactly the storage mistakes covered in keeping your recovery phrase safe, and inheritance planning is not an exception to that guidance, it is a reason to follow it more carefully.
Do not tell more people than the plan requires. Every additional person who knows where to look and what to do is another person who could, intentionally or not, put the funds at risk while you are still using them normally.
Test the plan, not just the wallet
Our guide to testing your wallet recovery before you need it covers verifying that a recovery phrase actually restores your wallet. Inheritance planning deserves the same discipline at the plan level, not just the technical level. Walk through what your chosen person would actually have to do, step by step, with the information you have given them, and see whether it holds together. A plan that only makes sense to the person who wrote it is not a plan that works.
Revisit it when your circumstances change. A wallet that held a small amount when you first set this up may not stay that way, and a plan built around one trusted person can go stale if that relationship changes or that person is no longer reachable. This is not a task to finish once. It is a habit to check on the same way you would check that a smoke detector still has a battery.