How I created a distributed backup for my seed phrase

Like many of you, I'm SUPER nervous about how I store the seed phrase for my hardware wallet. It doesn't (and has never!) exist anywhere digitally.

95% of it is stored physically, securely in a location. The remaining 5% is stored somewhere else securely.

But, what if something happens to the single physical location? I don't have multiple houses / safes / safety deposit boxes, so what to do?

I realized that I had 4 people I could trust enough to hold something securely for me, but not enough to give them the whole shebang. So, I found a legitimate use for everyone's favorite new online tool. "Split 23 items among 4 people so it requires any 3 people to have all of the information"

That response got me started to the solution I ended up going with. I used excel to generate 4 spreadsheets with 25 random 4 digit numbers in column 1.

I printed out each spreadsheet and created a key. The key had numbers 1-23 on the far left column, then 4 columns (1 for each spreadsheet).

1 | 6412 | 7372 | | |

2 | 9103 | | 1258 | |

3 | | 1358 | 8342 | |

In this case, Word 1 is on spreadsheet 1 and 2. It's matched to number 6412 and 7372. Word 2 is on spreadsheet 1 and 3, matched to 9103 and 1258. And so on....

I got through the list and made sure each word existed on 2 spreadsheets.

Then, I took the original 25 row spreadsheets, found the numbers that matched the seed and filled those in. I had 12 or 13 spots left over on each spreadsheet, so I printed out a BIP word list and filled in random words.

The spreadsheets sent out look like this (assuming this is spreadsheet 1):

8916 | Random BIP Word |

6412 | Word 1 from my phrase |

8384 | Random BIP Word |

9103 | Word 2 from my phrase |

Etc, etc, etc.

I then stored the key that matches numbers to words securely digitally. The digital copy has no words, no description, no nothing, it's just a list of 23 sets of 2 numbers in order. It's completely useless to anyone but me.

The 4 different people don't know each other and were just asked to hold something that could only be opened at my or my wife's direction. It would take 3 of them working together to have 23 words of a 24 word seed phrase (none of them got the 24th word) and they have 75 words total to sift through.

If something were to happen to my safe, I feel pretty secure in being able to recover everything with a little help from my friends!

Hopefully this made sense, but feel free to ask any questions you may have!