Handing a sealed envelope to a relative is no different to just telling them how to access your coins in the first place. Both depend 100% on trust.
I wouldn't give my seed to relatives, even in a sealed envelope, and I wouldn't recommend anyone to do it. Because if someone steal it from them, you will lose all your funds. I was just suggesting to give them the password of the encrypted seed you want to bequeath to your wife, instead of a notary.
You can also schedule a mail to her birthday for example, and cancel it every year if you are not dead or amnesiac, or you can simply use a service that allow your heirs or trusted people to access your datas after your death or after being inactive during a given amount of time, like
this one for example.
I would be very careful trusting any third party with any part of my recovery process. A regulated lawyer is maybe acceptable - a service ran by one of the worst offenders when it comes to privacy (Google) definitely is not.
Why? What Google could do with a password of an offline encrypted seed ? You think an employee could guess it's a password of an encrypted seed and break into your house, to find and steal it?
So what will you do, if someone is able to imitate your voice and ask her by phone to immediately send all your funds to a given address because you've been hacked and you are away, for example?
Well, first she couldn't, because my back ups are not in one location, so it would take her time to recover all the necessary pieces in order to gain access to the wallets. Secondly, she's not an idiot so that wouldn't happen. There are literally thousands of questions she could ask to which only I could answer to confirm it was me. And third, if this was a realistic prospect, then there is nothing stopping the same thing happening to all our fiat accounts too.
[/quote]Bank transferts can be reversed if the money hasn't been withdrawal, instant transferts have a maximum limit and normal transferts take one working day to be executed.