Setting up your recovery circle

Your recovery circle is the small group of people who can, together, open your vault after you’re gone. The key is split among them so that no one member can open it alone, but the right combination can, even if a card or a person is missing.

Who belongs in a circle

Pick people who are:

Likely to outlive you, or at least not certain to share your risks.
Reachable: an email address or phone number that will still work in five years.
Trusted in combination: no single member needs to be beyond doubt, because no single member can act alone; the quorum needs to be trustworthy.

Circle members need no accounts, no apps, and no technical skill. They hold a printed card and occasionally tap a link.

Templates

The wizard offers a small set of shapes; all of them map to group thresholds under the hood, and you can adjust the numbers.

Default (2 of 3 groups): Group A: spouse or partner (alone sufficient as one group), Group B: your children together, Group C: a professional (attorney, accountant, or executor). Any two groups recover: spouse + kids, spouse + professional, or kids + professional.
No spouse: children (or siblings) as one group, close friend as another, professional as a third.
No professional: family + friends variants.
Friends only: for people whose chosen family is their family.
Self-share: shares split across your own locations (home safe, bank box, office), for single people who want a pure “future me or my estate” arrangement. Understand that this trades away the human veto layer.

Read the sentences

After you choose, the app generates plain-English recovery-path sentences and asks you to scroll through all of them and confirm:

Maria and both kids can recover. The kids alone cannot. Maria and your attorney can recover. Your attorney alone cannot.

Read them slowly. These sentences are the actual security policy of your vault, translated exactly from the math. If one of them surprises you, change the structure until none of them do.

The correlated-death check

The wizard asks a question estate planning usually forgets: do any of these people live together or travel together?

If your spouse and both children share a home, one house fire holds three cards. If your two group-B members always fly together, one crash removes a whole group. The check warns you in both directions:

Destroyed quorum: a single event could make recovery impossible.
Formed quorum: a single household could reach a quorum without anyone outside it, which weakens the collusion protection.

Fixes are ordinary: put one card with someone geographically distant, use a professional as a group of one, or hold a group’s threshold below its count (2-of-3 kids rather than 3-of-3) so one missing card doesn’t block anything.

When the circle changes

People move, die, and fall out. Changing the circle is one operation: re-share. A new set of cards is generated from the same vault key, the old set is revoked (old cards become useless even if never returned), and the app drives you to confirm destruction or reprint. Quarterly health checks tell you when a change is needed before you’d otherwise notice: two consecutive missed attestations on one card and the app suggests a re-share, calmly.

What your circle should be told

Tell each member three things when you hand them a card:

“Keep this somewhere that survives a house move.”
“A few times a year you’ll get a link asking to confirm you still have it. Tap it.”
“If I die, open the instruction sheet. It explains everything from there — you don’t need to remember anything today.”

That’s the whole job description.