How to Do a Digital Audit (30 Minutes, Zero Cost)

You probably have more online accounts than you think. The average person has 100+. Most people can name about 20 off the top of their head. The other 80 sit quietly, collecting dust, auto-renewing on a card you forgot about, or holding data you haven't looked at in years.

A digital audit fixes this. It's not complicated. It doesn't cost anything. It takes about 30 minutes. Here's the step-by-step.

Phase 1: Find Everything (15 minutes)

Before you can secure anything, you need to know what exists. These four searches will surface accounts you forgot about.

Search Your Email

Open Gmail, Outlook, or whatever you use. Search these terms one at a time:

• "welcome to" — onboarding emails from every service you signed up for
• "verify your email" — account verification emails
• "your account" — account-related notifications
• "subscription" — recurring payments
• "password reset" — services you've had to recover

Each search will surface services you forgot existed. Write them down in a note or spreadsheet as you go.

Check Your Password Manager

If you use one, open it and scroll through every entry. Some of these are current. Some are from three jobs ago. List them all.

If you don't use one, open your browser's saved passwords:

• Chrome: chrome://settings/passwords
• Firefox: about:logins
• Safari: Settings → Passwords

This alone will surface 50-80 accounts.

Check Your Phone

Open Settings → Apps (Android) or Settings → General → iPhone Storage (iOS). Every app listed is an account. Scroll through. Write down the ones with logins.

Check Your Bank Statements

Open your last three months of statements. Look at every recurring charge. Subscriptions are accounts. Some are worth keeping. Some aren't. All of them need to be in your list.

Phase 2: Categorize Everything (5 minutes)

Group every account into one of four buckets:

You'll end up with 5-15 financial, 5-10 essential, 20+ subscriptions, and a lot of "everything else."

Phase 3: Decide What to Do (5 minutes)

For each bucket:

Financial: Keep them all, secure them all. No deletions here.

Essential: Same. These are your backbone accounts.

Subscriptions:

• Cancel any you haven't used in 3 months
• Keep the ones you use monthly
• For each one you keep, check if someone else could access it if you couldn't

Everything else:

• Delete inactive accounts you don't need. Every inactive account is a data breach waiting to happen.
• For social media you want preserved, check if the platform has a transition tool (most don't — we covered this in our social media account guide)

Phase 4: Close the Gaps (5 minutes)

Now that you know what you have, fix the easy vulnerabilities:

1. Enable 2FA on financial and essential accounts. SMS is better than nothing. An authenticator app is better than SMS. A hardware key is best. Just don't leave anything with only a password.

2. Remove old devices. Check each essential account's "active sessions" or "authorized devices" page. Remove anything you don't recognize or haven't used in a year.

3. Update recovery email and phone. If your recovery email is an address you lost access to three moves ago, fix it now. Same for your phone number.

4. Write down where your backup plan lives. One sentence, shared with one person: "My passwords are in [Bitwarden / 1Password / etc.] and the master password is written down in [location]."

The Real Point

A digital audit isn't about being organized for its own sake. It's about one question: if you couldn't log in tomorrow, would anyone know where to look?

If the answer is no, your 30-minute audit just became the most productive half hour of your week.

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Related reading:

• Digital Asset Inventory Checklist — "after your audit, use this fill-in-the-blank template to document every account you just found"
• How to Talk to Your Family About Your Digital Plan — "once you know what you have, the next step is telling someone where to find it"
• What Happens to Your Social Media Accounts — "your audit will surface old social accounts — here's what each platform does after you stop logging in"

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Once you know what you have, the next step is making sure someone else can access it when you're not around. In Case lets you store what matters — bank details, crypto keys, domain names, insurance info — in an AES-256-GCM encrypted vault. Your contacts get a link and a code. No app to install, no USB to find, no terminal commands to memorize. You set the waiting period, and if you stop replying, they get in. Open source, bootstrapped, no investors to answer to.