A recent article in The New York Times titled “Leaving Behind the Digital Keys to Financial Lives” picked up on this theme since we do most of our banking and investing online. If you go to the effort to document your legal wishes in an estate plan for the control and management for your estate, then they at least need to know the “what” and the “where” regarding the estate to control and manage.
Unfortunately, digital accounts have few paper trails by their very nature and passwords may change every week. Simply put, you have to plan to hand over the keys to your digital estate and that often can take more diligence than planning for the keys of the family home.
As helpfully summed up over in the original article:
People needed to think about five things to ensure that everything goes smoothly with their digital financial lives if they become incapacitated or die: they need to maintain a list of their digital information; send the information to someone they trust; make sure other people know who has the information; leave instructions for how everything should be handled; and note all of this in an estate plan and update it regularly.
