You got me curious. Passwords yeah, but tax documents? Why?

GNOME disks is a nice GUI that lets you setup disks with ease. Encryption can be easily setup with it.

So when the laptop dies, the disk cannot be read anywhere because the tpm is lost?

If your drive starts malfunctioning, then without encryption you might be able to read some sectors and recover a few things. With encryption you are SOL.

My drives are not encrypted because it’s a hassle if things start going wrong. My NAS is software raid so the individual disks mean nothing anyway. The only drive that is encrypted is my backup disk and I’m not really sure if it was needed.