Estate Planning For Your Digital Assets

If you are thinking about updating your estate plan, this may be a good time to get your digital assets in order too.

If you are active in social media or access your bank account or your memberships online its worth looking into how to ensure you keep your username and password information safe. These days research shows that the average person may keep passwords to more than twenty five accounts.

There are several steps you can take to help those who will be entrusted with administering your assets potentially accessing your digital assets or intangible property.

Start with making an inventory of all the social media sites that you are active with or have opened accounts with and all the websites that you have access to and write down the name of the websites, application, entities and each username and password as well as the answer to their security questions. Also, remember to add to this list the passwords or pin codes to access your mobile phone, computer and other devices such as smart thermostats or alarms.

You can draw separate lists for your personal digital assets, such as your email, digital photos,cloud services, and financial services and your business digital assets, such as your company’s website, domain name, back up data and intellectual property or trademarks. Access to music and e-books stored digitally in most cases can only be done with a password via a specific password protected device and may not be transferable.

While it is worth inquiring with us about adding a paragraph to your will or power of attorney to provide consent to access your digital legacy, most service providers may restrict access to a fiduciary even if they had a power of attorney or access to your email or password. One of the reasons is that there are several laws and statutes like the Federal Privacy Laws that limit or prohibit access to your computer or digital assets. In New York State, the Estates, Powers and Trusts Law (EPTL) Article 13 A governs the administration of digital assets. EPTL Article 13 Adefines digital assets and provides for different treatment depending whether the item is the“content of electronic communications” or “other digital assets.”. Service providers like Google,Twitter and Facebook have their own tools and these may precede your wishes, will or power of attorney.

Another layer of protection may be to print or back up digitally on an external drive, emails or digital photographs. Unfortunately, these days, valuable information is exchanged via email and not stored anywhere else, unless copied, printed or backed up digitally.

It is also important to take note of those accounts or investment accounts that are only kept digitally, or paperless and to ensure that printed records are made available to our loved ones to access after we are gone.

Finally, remember to keep the information in a safe place and let your fiduciaries know where to find it.