Our family password manager is safer on paper and chaos in real life

I convinced my family to use a password manager after my mother reused the same password on several shopping accounts. Everyone agreed in principle. In practice, we have created three different systems and one shared note called “logins new.”

My father stores his own accounts but forgets which email address he used. My mother saves some passwords in the manager and lets her browser save others. My younger brother joined the family vault, then added a streaming login to a private folder nobody else can see. I am the only person who understands the recovery instructions, which means our supposedly safer system now depends heavily on me being available.

The shared items are also messy. We have a utility account, two streaming services, the Wi-Fi details, and a few household subscriptions. Those belong in a shared area. Personal banking, medical portals, and work accounts clearly do not. The confusing middle includes travel bookings, the family phone plan, and accounts one person owns but another may need during an emergency.

I do not want to become the household password administrator. I especially do not want anyone sending a master password in a text because the new setup feels harder than the old one.

My proposed reset is deliberately boring: choose one manager, move only five shared household accounts first, write down who owns each account, test access from each person's device, and create recovery instructions that do not rely on a single relative remembering everything. Personal accounts can migrate gradually. We can also agree that the shared vault is not permission to browse each other's private information.

Is that too cautious, or is a slow rollout the only realistic one? For families that actually kept using a password manager after the enthusiastic first weekend, what rules prevented the shared vault from becoming either a junk drawer or a surveillance tool?