Are Your Digital Assets Protected in Your Estate Plan?

In today’s digital age, much of our life can be found online. We do everything from banking, running our businesses, reading, building relationships, connecting with friends and investing online. We even save our most precious memories in the cloud. Given the wide array of digital services available to us, your virtual footprint can grow to be more enormous than you ever imagined. While some of your online activity may not seem that important, other aspects are. Yet, if you don’t take steps to protect your digital assets, then they could wind up lost or outright forgotten about. It could also subject you and your estate to identity theft, fraud or outright embarrassment.

Fortunately, there are steps you can take to protect your digital assets through the estate planning process. This may take a little extra work on your part, though, as not all established estate plans are sufficient to address these assets.

How can you create an estate plan that incorporates your digital assets?

Your will and trusts, if you have some in place, are most likely going to address concrete assets, such as your money, real estate and personal property. But they might leave a gap that allows your digital assets to slip through the cracks. To prevent that from happening, you should consider taking the following steps:

• Identify all your digital assets: Your online presence may be so expansive that it’s hard to immediately call to mind all of your digital assets and accounts. Yet, you need to identify them all if you want to protect them through estate planning. So, be sure to take some time to reflect on what accounts you may have, recall what passwords you use and write down the answers to any security questions that may be in place to protect your accounts.
• Figure out who you want to handle each digital asset: There may be one person you’re comfortable giving access to all your digital assets. But in some cases, that approach doesn’t make sense. For example, if you have an online platform that you use to make money, such as an Etsy site, then you may not want to leave that to your minor child. Instead, it’s probably a better idea to leave access and control of that platform to your spouse or a business associate who can continue to use it to generate revenue, if they so choose.
• Consider naming a digital asset executor: In your will, you can specify who will be responsible for allocating access to your digital assets while also following your instructions for how digital assets should be handled. If you have certain accounts or online posts that you want deleted, for example, then you can specify that the digital executor is responsible for carrying out that task.
• Make sure your digital assets are specifically addressed in your estate plan: You don’t want your digital assets to fall through the cracks. So, it’s in your best interests to ensure that you’ve taken the appropriate legal steps to incorporate them into your estate plan. This may mean generating a more detailed will or modifying an existing one. Your attorney can review your estate plan and work with you to ensure that your goals regarding digital assets are met.

Don’t leave estate planning to chance

There’s a lot that goes into the estate planning process. Yet, it’s all too easy to overlook something that winds up posing a problem for your estate and your loved ones. These issues can prove costly to navigate, and they can raise tensions amongst family members. If you want to head off those issues, then now is the time to start thinking about the best way to create a holistic estate plan that addresses your digital assets.