Have You Included Digital Assets In Your Estate Plan?

Failure to plan could mean some of your digital assets will be lost.

Have you considered how much of your life is stored in digital accounts? Depending on your age, it’s possible that nearly every memory you have is electronic. For example, it’s not unusual for people to have thousands of pictures documenting nearly everything they do—including what they ate for lunch—but not even one of those memories is a physical asset.

But even beyond sentimental photos and your social media accounts, do you own cryptocurrencies, have a PayPal account or use online banking? What about your email account(s), cloud- based document storage, or an e-commerce shop?

Our immersion in the digital world has created a new estate planning issue: How will your digital assets be handled when you die? Keep in mind that your digital property may include anything from computing hardware (such as computers, phones, tablets, external hard drives, flash drives, and other devices), any information or data that is stored electronically, any online accounts, domain names, intellectual property, online credit card or banking accounts, to cryptocurrency, and more.

The State of the Law

Unfortunately, there are limited laws around the handling of digital assets after death. All your photos on Facebook, your documents on the cloud, and your password-protected iTunes library, to name a few, are in a bit of legal limbo.

Each time you click “agree” to the Terms of Service Agreement you’ve subjected your digital assets to an individualized set of rules specific to that company. In some cases, the companies that store your information can—and do—permanently delete your account upon your death regardless of your wishes. In other cases, another person signing into your account, using your login and password information, could cause the account to be frozen, further complicating asset distribution. In the case of iTunes or other subscription-type services, your ownership might expire when you do, based on the terms of a licensing agreement.