Make a Plan for Your Digital Assets

Estate plans contain traditional assets like financial, real estate, personal property and family heirlooms.  But you have digital assets as well.  And if you do not make a plan for those assets, they may be lost forever.  And even if you make a plan, if you do not make sure to let your executor or trustee know about those assets, you may still lose them.

With so much of our lives being lived online these days, our digital assets can be quite extensive and extremely valuable.  It is more important than ever to make sure your estate plan includes detailed provisions for these digital assets.

Types of Digital Assets

There are two kinds of digital assets:  those with a financial value and those without.  Assets with a financial value can include things like bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies, money in your Venmo or Paypal accounts, domain names, or websites or blogs that generate income.  These assets have a real, quantifiable, financial value and should be included in your planning. 

Some digital assets have no financial value but do have a tremendous amount of sentimental value, like photos stored in the cloud, music, videos, email accounts and social media accounts.  It is just as important to make a plan for these assets so that your family does not lose access to them in the case of your incapacity or death.

Assets with Financial Value

Be sure to keep a detailed accounting of the digital assets that you own that have a financial value.  Ownership of these accounts can be transferred via a Will or a Trust – but only if your executor or trustee knows about them!  Be sure to include these assets when you create an inventory of your assets when creating an estate plan.  We can help you make sure these assets don’t get lost.

Assets without Financial Value

Though you might not realize it, you may not actually own many of these digital assets at all.  When you purchase digital property such as Kindle e-books or music files, all you really own is a license to use it.  In many cases, that license is for your personal use only and is non-transferable.  Whether or not you can transfer these assets depends almost entirely on the account’s Terms of Service Agreements (TOSA) that you agreed to (often just by clicking a box) when you opened the account.  While many TOSAs restrict access to accounts to only the original user, some allow access by heirs or executors in certain situations.

Carefully review the TOSAs of the online accounts that are most important to you to determine if you own the assets itself or just a license to use it and whether you can transfer the license to anyone else.  If you only have a license to use the account and no ability to transfer it, it may not be possible for your loved ones to access the account if something happens to you.  And even if you provide the passwords for these accounts to your loved ones, they may violate the TOSA just by accessing it.

The Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act

The Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act has been adopted in Washington State and lays out guidelines under which fiduciaries, such as executors and trustees, can accesses digital accounts.  The Act allows you to grant a fiduciary access to your digital accounts upon your death or incapacity, either through an online tool provided by the service provider or through your estate plan.  For example, Google and Facebook provide tools to assign someone to manage your account if you pass away.  If an online tool is not available or if you do not set it up, the Act gives priority to directives in your Will, Trust or Power of Attorney.  So as long as you use the provider’s tool – if there is one – or include instructions in your estate plan, your digital assets should remain accessible to your loved ones.

Make a Comprehensive Plan

With technology rapidly evolving, it’s more important than ever to make sure that any plan you created will cover all your assets, whether they exist online or not.  We can help you create a plan that keeps up with the ever-changing world we live in.  Give us a call today to set up your complimentary Estate Analysis Planning Session ($750 value) to Make a Plan!