Password musings

What do I do about passwords?

I wonder if I died how do my family and friends take care of all my online stuff? I was thinking maybe I should make a notebook of passwords and then hide it in the fireproof safe so no one could have it. All my important papers are there already so if something happened to me, people would be able to access all my stuff and shut things down, stop payments and the like.

Is having all that stuff written down, floating around out there a good thing?

I just read a book where the murdered characters (yes, I realize it's fiction but the point I want to make is actually applicable, regardless of fact or fiction) have a computer file called "passwords" and the police techies are making fun of them for doing that. Well, OK. Seemed like a good idea to me. However, the big problem is that someone would need to know my computer password to access the file called passwords, if I had something like that. Unless, of course, I was murdered and then the PD techies could share the info with my family.

Anyway, more realistically, what do I do? I'm a single person who relishes her privacy so what do I do about passwords? I have a few email accounts, blogger, Barnes and Noble, my banking, my mobile service... just tons of stuff that someone would need to shut down if I were dead, and would need passwords to do it.

Does anyone else have a thought on this? Maybe I'm just crazy with too much time on my hands to be thinking of stuff like this...

Mags