What To Do If You Wake Up Dead

At 85-years-old, Florida native Priscilla Slack should be enjoying her retirement. Instead, for the past two years, she’s been battling an onslaught of bewildering Byzantine bureaucracy.

It all started two years ago when Priscilla’s husband passed away. Then, with the click of a button in the Social Security office, Priscilla was dead too. Except, of course, she wasn’t.

But, in this day and age, if the system says you’re dead, you might as well be… as Priscilla discovered when her bank account and credit card were cancelled, her benefits were cut off, and she wasn’t allowed to vote because she was registered as deceased. Then, when she filed her taxes, the IRS came after her because as far as they were concerned the Social Security number she used—her own—belonged to a dead person.

Priscilla has repeatedly proven she’s very much alive but that clerical error has caused numerous systems to bump her off over the years. And she’s not alone…

In Georgia, 88-year-old Yvonne Spain Light was discharged after a stay in a nursing home… but that’s not how it was recorded by the facility with the Federal government.

Instead of typing “discharged” into Yvonne’s medical records, someone typed “deceased” and just like that, she was. Certainly as far as Medicare and her insurance was concerned.

The problem was discovered when she was being admitted to another facility and was told she had no insurance because, you guessed it, she was dead.

As a result, she had to cover health care costs out of pocket until the whole mess was cleared up because although clerical errors can be fixed in seconds, the knock-on effects can last a lot longer. In this case, Yvonne was looking at as long as a month for her coverage to be restored.

In Arizona, Patrick Fish was processing the recent death of his mother when he discovered the Social Security office had declared him dead instead. With that, his bank account was shut down and he lost access to his health insurance.

The advice was to go to his local Social Security office with identification to prove he was very much alive—but there was a week-and-a-half wait just for an appointment. In the end, he shared his story on local news, the miracle of which saw him resurrected in record time.

The Social Security Administration insists such events are uncommon but the fact is thousands of Americans are mistakenly declared dead every year by government organizations. And I’m willing to bet if you’re among them, and your access to your bank account and health care is cut off, you won’t be too interested in how rare an event it might be.

It’s just one of the many reasons you need a back-up plan. I sleep easier knowing if some U.S. government agency wiped me off their files in the morning I would still exist elsewhere in the world…

In Panama, for example, where I have residency and where I’ve staked my claim at Los Islotes and in Ireland where I hold a passport and in the various other countries where I maintain bank accounts and own real estate…

It’s a way to protect yourself and your assets from events outside of your control, be they wars, financial crashes, or killer computer glitches…

Stay diversified,