Digital Asset Planning
Your digital life is part of your estate too.
Photos. Email. Social accounts. Cryptocurrency. Domains. Online businesses. Cloud storage. Subscription accounts. Intellectual property. Digital wallets.
A modern estate plan should address more than houses and bank accounts.
It should also answer:
Who can access your digital life?
What should be preserved?
What should be transferred?
What should be shut down?
What has financial or sentimental value?
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What counts as a digital asset?
Digital assets can include things like:
- email accounts
- cloud storage
- social media
- websites and domains
- online businesses
- digital photos and videos
- cryptocurrency and digital wallets
- online financial accounts
- intellectual property
- royalty streams
- monetized content
- subscription accounts
- digital records
- online marketplaces
- gaming or virtual assets
- digital files with personal or business value
Some have financial value.
Some have emotional value.
Some have both.
Access is not the same as ownership
This is where digital planning gets tricky.
Even if someone is your trustee or executor, that does not automatically mean they can log into every account.
Access can depend on:
- California law
- federal privacy law
- the platform’s terms of service
- whether you used the platform’s own legacy-contact tools
- how the account is titled
- what authority your estate plan gives your fiduciary
- whether the fiduciary has the information needed to locate the asset in the first place
That is why digital assets need their own planning conversation.
California has specific rules for fiduciary access
California follows the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act.
That law creates a framework for when fiduciaries such as trustees, executors, and agents may access digital assets and electronic communications.
But the rules can depend heavily on what instructions you gave during life.
In some situations, a direction made through an online tool provided by the platform can control over a general instruction in your estate plan.
The details matter.
Your estate plan should give the right people authority.
Depending on the document, your plan can address digital authority for:
- your trustee
- your executor
- your financial agent
- other fiduciaries responsible for managing your affairs
The goal is to make sure they have legal authority to handle digital property when appropriate.
That may include authority to:
- access accounts
- manage digital property
- transfer assets
- retrieve records
- close accounts
- preserve files
- deal with online businesses
- administer digital intellectual property
Cryptocurrency needs more than legal language.
Crypto creates a special problem.
A perfectly drafted trust cannot recover cryptocurrency if no one can access the wallet.
Digital-asset planning may need to address both:
Legal authority
Who has the right to control the asset?
and
Practical access
How will that person actually locate and access it?
That may involve:
- wallet information
- seed phrases
- hardware wallets
- exchange accounts
- security procedures
- instructions stored separately from the estate plan
Sensitive access credentials generally should not simply be written into the trust itself.
Online businesses are real businesses.
If you earn income through:
- a website
- newsletter
- YouTube channel
- course platform
- digital products
- affiliate accounts
- memberships
- social media
- online marketplaces
- licensing or royalties
those accounts may have both business and estate-planning consequences.
Someone may need authority to keep the business running, collect revenue, preserve intellectual property, transfer ownership, or wind things down.
For entrepreneurs and creators, digital planning can be a meaningful part of business succession planning.
Some things should be preserved. Others should disappear.
Not every digital account needs to survive you.
You may want:
- family photos preserved
- a website maintained
- business accounts transferred
- social accounts memorialized
- certain private files deleted
- subscription services canceled
- personal email handled in a particular way
Those decisions can be documented before someone else has to guess.
A password list is not an estate plan.
Keeping organized account information is useful.
But simply handing someone your passwords does not necessarily give them legal authority to access or manage an account.
And putting every password into your estate-planning documents creates its own security problems.
The better approach is to coordinate:
legal authority + secure access information + practical instructions.
Digital planning is especially important if your life or work lives online.
This may deserve extra attention if you:
- own cryptocurrency
- run an online business
- create content
- own domains or websites
- receive royalties
- store significant records in the cloud
- have valuable intellectual property
- have no obvious person who knows where your digital assets are
- keep much of your personal life digitally rather than on paper
The Haven approach
We ask:
What digital assets actually matter?
Which have financial value?
Which have personal value?
Who should have authority over them?
What should happen to each one?
Would that person actually know how to find or access them?
Then we make sure the legal plan and practical access plan work together.
What happens next
01 — Identify your digital assets
Financial, personal, business, and sentimental.
02 — Decide what should happen to them
Preserve, transfer, manage, close, or delete.
03 — Give the right people legal authority
Through your trust, will, or power of attorney where appropriate.
04 — Create a secure access plan
So your fiduciary can actually carry out the instructions.
Your digital life should not become inaccessible simply because you are.
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Haven Legal Studio provides California estate planning legal services. Website information is general educational information and is not legal advice.