Estate Planning for Digital Assets

What are digital assets?

Digital asset are fairly recent concepts. It is broadly understood as referring to any content, account or media created and stored either online or on a digital device, that is uniquely identifiable and provides value.

Digital assets can range from:

Email accounts
Subscription accounts such as Netflix, iTunes, Amazon Prime etc.
Social media accounts such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram
Online photo, video and digital music storage and sharing sites
Shopping accounts with websites such as eBay, Amazon, PayPal
E-books, e.g., Kindle accounts
Any websites created using a third party’s services and hosting facilities
Cryptocurrency accounts

Can you transfer ownership of digital assets?

As this concept is now being developed, there are not yet well-established procedures and authorities on how to preserve digital assets.

At the end of the day however, it boils down to whether you wish your loved ones to have access to your digital assets after you pass.

For instance, you may wish to leave your Amazon Prime account to your spouse, your iTunes collection to your children or for business partners to have access to your emails after your death.
Currently, entities like Apple, Yahoo, Google etc. will not give the next of kin access to these accounts of their deceased relatives, as it constitutes breach of their privacy policy with the deceased user.

Even if this is specified in the deceased’s Will, particularly where it is not a US Will, it is still very uncommon and certainly entails years of procedural filings before those corporations will consider granting access to a deceased client’s digital account.

How can you preserve your digital assets?

A much easier solution then would be for you to plan ahead and leave your loved ones with a record of your various digital accounts, together with login details and passwords. Remember, this is only if you wish your loved ones to have access to your digital footprint. It is also not a carte blanche rule, meaning that you can certainly leave access to your Netflix account, while choosing not to leave details of your email accounts or online shopping accounts.

Please give this step some serious consideration before implementing it, weighing both the types of accounts you wish to share access to, as well as the persons you will be sharing it with. A relative who you share your Amazon or eBay account with can legitimately order any amount and value of items and have these charged to the credit card on file – which would be yours. Even though you have now passed, your estate will be responsible for settling those charges.

Recommendation

If there are any Digital Accounts you wish to share with your loved ones, these accounts and your username and password for them should be contained within a sealed letter stored with your Will.

It is not recommended that you include this type of information in the Will itself, given that once your Will is probated, it becomes a public document. Storing the information in a sealed letter, alongside your Will, therefore maintains a degree of privacy over your Digital Assets.

You may therefore wish to give serious consideration to where you store your executed Will and who you appoint as its Executor.