When it comes to estate planning, it’s important to be rigorous in inventorying your assets and being careful to allocate each and every one. This is easy enough with tangible assets, but what about those things that exist solely in the digital realm? As our lives become progressively digitized, these unembodied assets are increasingly critical to estate planning—though at times, it can be tough knowing what to do with them.
Including Digital Assets in Your Estate Plan
When we talk about digital assets, we’re talking about everything from email accounts and social media profiles to online bank accounts and PayPal membership. It’s important to encompass these within your estate plan for a number of reasons, including fraud protection. If the benefactors of your estate don’t know about these accounts, and something compromises their security, your estate could lose money fast—and no one will be the wiser.
But of course, there is an even simpler reason to include digital assets in your estate planning: You surely want the money in these accounts to be part of your online legacy—just like you want your social media profiles to go to a trustworthy custodian—and the best way to ensure the proper care is to formally incorporate digital assets into your estate plan.
What to Include
As such, we recommend that you have a full list of all your digital assets, along with login information and passwords; the latter you may wish to store somewhere securely, such as in a safe deposit box, and provide instructions for how the executor of your estate should retrieve them.
Make sure to keep this list of digital assets current, as you either open new accounts or else change the login information.
To learn more about how to properly include digital assets in your will and/or trust, it’s best to talk through the particulars with an estate planning professional. Reach out to Singh Law Firm to start that conversation.
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