Digital Assets You Should Handle in Your Will

Today’s wills must account for digital assets as well as physical and financial ones. You can leave behind instructions for any or all of your digital assets in your estate plan, but only some can actually pass through your will. These are assets that you own and have real, value to them.

Examples of these assets include:

• Bitcoin or other types of cryptocurrencies
• Funds in PayPal accounts or other digital wallets
• Digital photos or music that you have stored on a hard drive or cloud
• Money owed to you from an online store
• Frequent flyer miles (depending on the airline policies)
• Domain names or copyrights (depending on the terms of the licensing agreement)

There are other types of digital assets that cannot pass through your will, either because they lack any monetary value, or because you do not have ownership rights for a transfer. Examples of these types of assets include email or social media accounts, some types of domains, subscription accounts (Netflix, Spotify), or certain types of software services.

That being said, you can still plan for what you wish to do with these assets or accounts upon your death. It is highly recommended that you leave behind a list of your online accounts and their corresponding passwords for your executor. You may wish to have your executor delete these accounts upon your passing, or you may choose to have social media profiles go into “memorial” status. Facebook, for example, allows a “memorial” setting for deceased users which leaves their profile active and gives one person control over the page.

For more information about how you should handle digital assets in your estate plan and which types of assets have the tangible value necessary to be passed through a will, contact tan experienced Florida estate planning lawyer at BaumannKangas Estate Law.