Digital Asset Management: What Happens to My Online Accounts When I Die or If I Am Incapacitated?
In 2023, most people have shifted (whether you wanted to or not) to living mostly online. Between keeping up with social media and managing your finances, the average person has more than 90 online accounts.
When dealing with estate planning, the common agenda is to ensure that you and your family are taken care of if the worst were to happen. Thinking about your online accounts isn’t something that comes to mind when planning how to make the administration of your estate easier for your executor or your power of attorney. However, your online accounts can be very important. Your fiduciary or loved ones will not be able to manage anything unless you’ve planned for that. For instance, many times people have opted to move away from receiving paper statements and have elected to get everything delivered online to their main email address.
The main question you should ask yourself “Who will have access to my accounts?” and “What accounts do I have?” Also, “Are there accounts that I do not want accessed even after death?”
Some examples are your financial accounts, utilities, taxes, photo managers, social media accounts and email accounts.
As an example, Facebook doesn’t want anyone to manage your Facebook account other than yourself. Facebook does provide an option for an account to be placed as a “legacy” account. This will allow your fiduciary to memorialize or terminate the account. This election must be done while you are alive. If you don’t choose to have your account permanently deleted, only your main profile will be memorialized if Facebook becomes aware of your passing.
Another example is Gmail. If you do not access your Gmail account for more than twenty-four months, Google will delete the account. Therefore, important information may be lost if the account isn’t accessed.
A great solution to this would be to maintain a password manager. If you provide this login information to your fiduciary, they will be able to access the accounts that you do have with the latest passwords. There are many good password managers available.
When it comes to logging into a computer, phone or other device, you will need to know the encryption code. This could be as simple as a four digit pin or something more complicated that may even need dual authentication; such as using Duo.
With cryptocurrency, if you do not have the encryption key or the private key, you will lose access to that underlying data, meaning the actual currency. If that happens, the cold wallet (an external drive) or web based account will be locked and completely inaccessible. There is no way to recover these accounts if they are lost.
Whether you want to use password managers or maintain a physical list, you should make a note for your fiduciary so that they can access this information upon your death. Otherwise, the information could be lost, inaccessible or could cause trouble in gaining access if necessary.
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