Your estate may include more than your home, financial accounts, and personal belongings. Email, social media, online photographs, cloud files, cryptocurrency, websites, domain names, and other digital property may also require attention after your death.
Managing these assets is not always as simple as giving someone a password. Account-provider policies, privacy laws, intellectual-property rights, and your estate-planning documents can all affect what another person may access, transfer, preserve, or close.
Including digital assets in your estate planning can give the people you trust clearer instructions and help them identify important accounts when the time comes.
What Counts as a Digital Asset?
A digital asset is generally an electronic record in which a person has a right or interest. Digital assets may include:
- Email and social media accounts
- Online photographs, videos, and cloud storage
- Cryptocurrency and digital wallets
- Websites, blogs, and domain names
- Online businesses and marketplace accounts
- Digitally stored documents and creative work
- Rewards, gaming assets, and other online accounts
- Business records, client lists, and intellectual property
Some digital assets have direct financial value. Others contain important records, personal information, creative work, or irreplaceable family memories.
It is also important to distinguish an online account from the property connected to it. Access to a financial institution’s website, for example, is not the same thing as ownership of the money in the account. The underlying asset may pass according to a beneficiary designation, trust, will, account agreement, or other applicable rules.
Similarly, some digital purchases are licensed for one person’s use rather than owned in a way that allows them to be transferred to someone else.
Does Your Family Automatically Receive Access?
A spouse, child, or other family member does not automatically receive unrestricted access to your digital accounts after your death.
Colorado’s Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act provides a process through which certain fiduciaries may request disclosure of digital assets. Depending on the circumstances, the person making the request might be a personal representative administering an estate or a trustee managing trust property.
However, the fiduciary’s authority can depend on:
- The instructions you provided
- The language in your will, trust, or power of attorney
- Whether you used an online planning tool offered by the account provider
- The type of information being requested
- The provider’s terms of service
- Federal privacy and communications laws
- Whether the fiduciary supplies the required documentation
The law also distinguishes between the content of electronic communications and other account information. Access to the actual contents of email or private messages may require more specific consent than access to a list or catalog showing that communications exist.
For that reason, an estate plan should address digital assets expressly rather than assuming that general language will provide every form of access a fiduciary may need.
Provider Tools Can Affect What Happens to an Account
Some technology companies allow users to make decisions about their accounts directly through an online tool.
Apple, for example, allows a user to designate a Legacy Contact who may request access to certain account data after the user’s death. Google offers an Inactive Account Manager that allows a user to select what should happen to certain information after a period of inactivity.
Under Colorado law, directions made through a qualifying online tool may take priority over conflicting instructions in a will, trust, power of attorney, or other record. If no such direction has been made, instructions in an estate-planning document may control over conflicting terms of service in certain circumstances.
Review these settings alongside your legal documents so that your instructions do not unintentionally conflict.
Create a Digital Asset Inventory
One of the most useful steps in digital estate planning is creating an inventory of your important accounts and digital property.
The inventory might identify:
- The name and type of each account
- The company or platform that maintains it
- The email address or username associated with it
- Whether it has financial, business, or sentimental value
- Whether an online legacy or inactive-account feature has been activated
- What you would like done with the account
- Where secure access information is maintained
Your instructions may differ from one account to another. You may want family photographs preserved, a subscription canceled, a social media profile memorialized, a domain name transferred, and an unused account permanently deleted.
Keep the inventory somewhere secure but accessible to the appropriate person. Review it periodically as accounts are opened, closed, or changed.
Do Not Put Passwords in Your Will
A will may become part of a public probate record. It is generally not an appropriate place to record passwords, wallet recovery phrases, access keys, or other sensitive credentials.
Instead, consider using a reputable password manager, secure digital vault, or another protected system. Make sure the appropriate person knows that the system exists and understands how authorized access may be obtained when needed.
Possessing a password does not necessarily create legal authority to use an account. Your estate-planning documents and provider settings should establish the appropriate authority, while your secure records help an authorized fiduciary identify and manage the accounts.
Coordinate Your Estate-Planning Documents
Different documents may address different parts of your digital life.
A will may authorize a personal representative to handle digital assets during estate administration. A trust may provide instructions for digital property held by or coordinated with the trust. A financial power of attorney may address who can manage digital assets if you become incapacitated during your lifetime.
Because access to the content of electronic communications may require express consent, these documents should be reviewed for language addressing both digital assets and electronic communications.
Mason Law & Planning Group can help you incorporate digital property into your broader estate plan and consider whether your appointed decision-makers have appropriate authority.
Plan Carefully for Cryptocurrency
Cryptocurrency and other blockchain-based assets can require additional planning because there may be no central institution capable of restoring access.
An inventory should identify the existence and general type of cryptocurrency without exposing private keys, seed phrases, or other credentials. Secure instructions should explain how an authorized person can locate the information needed to manage or transfer the assets.
The plan should account for:
- Whether assets are held through an exchange or private wallet
- How the fiduciary will learn that the assets exist
- Where access credentials or recovery information are secured
- Who should ultimately receive the assets
- Whether the fiduciary has the technical knowledge needed to manage them
- Potential tax and valuation considerations
If no one knows that cryptocurrency exists—or if the information needed to access it is permanently lost—the asset may be impossible to recover.
Separate Personal and Business Accounts
Digital property connected to a business may require different instructions from personal accounts.
Business-related assets can include:
- Company email accounts
- Websites and domain registrations
- E-commerce storefronts
- Cloud-based records
- Social media profiles
- Customer databases
- Online advertising accounts
- Subscription software
- Digital intellectual property
A business succession plan should address who can maintain these systems if an owner dies or becomes incapacitated. Access may also be governed by operating agreements, employment arrangements, privacy obligations, and contracts with customers or vendors.
Personal credentials should not be the only means of reaching essential business systems. Appropriate employees or successors may need documented authority and a secure continuity plan.
Consider Whether a Trust Is Part of the Plan
A trust may be able to hold or provide instructions concerning certain digital property, but creating a trust does not automatically place every online account or digital asset under its control.
Ownership, beneficiary designations, provider agreements, and transfer restrictions still matter. Assets with business or intellectual-property value may require additional documentation.
Mason Law & Planning Group’s trust-planning services can help you consider how eligible digital property should be coordinated with a trust and the rest of your estate plan.
A Digital Estate-Planning Checklist
As you review your digital life, consider these steps:
- Create an inventory of significant digital accounts and property
- Identify which assets have financial, business, or sentimental value
- Decide which accounts should be preserved, transferred, memorialized, or closed
- Review legacy-contact and inactive-account settings
- Confirm that your will, trust, and power of attorney address digital assets
- Consider providing express authorization concerning electronic communications
- Store passwords and recovery information securely
- Coordinate cryptocurrency and business accounts with specialized planning
- Tell the appropriate person where your inventory and instructions are stored
- Update the plan as your accounts and technology change
Include Your Digital Life in Your Estate Plan
Digital estate planning is about more than sharing passwords. It involves identifying your digital property, deciding what should happen to it, authorizing the appropriate people to act, and coordinating those decisions with account-provider tools and legal documents.
A thoughtful plan can help preserve valuable property and family memories while making it easier for a fiduciary to manage or close the accounts you leave behind.
Mason Law & Planning Group helps individuals and families in Monument, Castle Rock, and throughout Colorado create estate plans that account for both traditional and digital property. If your current plan does not address your online accounts, cryptocurrency, electronic communications, or other digital assets, contact Mason Law & Planning Group to schedule a consultation.
This article is provided for general educational purposes and is not legal advice. Rights involving digital assets depend on the account, applicable law, provider policies, estate-planning documents, and individual circumstances.