Are you one of the millions of Americans living a double life? No, we’re not talking about spies or people who have a secret second family. We’re talking about people who have an online presence that mirrors their real-world actions.
If you bank or invest online, manage your health insurance through an app, stream content, or post on social media, you are building an archive of your activity and preferences that is rivaled only by your brain. What happens to this treasure trove of information after you die is one of the big questions anyone crafting their estate plan should be considering.
At Palmer & Slay PLLC, we work with individuals in the Brandon, Mississippi, area who want to ensure their heirs can delete, preserve, or profit from their digital legacy.
Taking Stock of Your Digital Doppelganger
While your online accounts and Google search history don’t paint a perfect picture of who you are, they come close enough that securing them after you are gone should be just as important as preventing hackers from taking them over today.
The first step in this process is taking stock of what you have. This means creating a list of all the places you have an online presence. This may include:
- Email accounts
- Social media accounts (Facebook, Instagram, X, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.)
- Online banking accounts
- Cryptocurrency keys
- Photo and video sharing and storage accounts
- Smartphone, computer, tablet or cloud data (Google Drive or Microsoft’s OneDrive)
- Websites or blogs you maintain
- Online marketplaces where you sell items (eBay, Etsy, Poshmark, etc.)
- Digital health, medical, and prescription records
- Lists of contacts
- Streaming accounts
- Utility accounts
- Travel loyalty or rewards
- Digital subscriptions
- Online shopping accounts (Amazon, Walmart, the local grocery store)
- NFTs or other digital only assets
- Text, graphic and audio files — whether purchased or created
And this is just the tip of the iceberg. The more you think about this, the longer the list is going to get since every company out there is pushing us to create an account with them and put more and more information about ourselves in their hands.
Keep this list up-to-date and make sure your heirs know where to locate it. But don’t put it in your will, since that document becomes a public record when your estate is probated.
Deciding What To Do With Your Digital Legacy
Once you know what online assets you have, now you can decide what your heirs should do with each of them after you die.
Your options are:
- Download
- Delete
- Transfer ownership to someone else, or
- Turn it into a memorial.
Palmer & Slay’s experienced attorneys can walk you through these options and help you craft an estate plan that accomplishes your specific goals. Some of the tactics we may employ include:
- Appointing a trusted individual as your digital executor. This person will be responsible for managing your digital assets according to your wishes. This can be the same person as your estate administrator, but it does not have to be.
- Working with you to proactively shut down accounts or transfer ownership or access to them to someone else now.
- Many online platforms offer tools to manage your account after death. For example, Facebook allows you to designate a “legacy contact” to manage your memorialized profile or delete it entirely. Google allows you to select an Inactive Account Manager who can dictate what happens to your account if it becomes inactive. We can help you update your account settings to reflect your wishes.
- Helping people who hold crypto ensure the taxes on their currency don’t burden their estate, and their heirs can actually access the funds.
Preserving your wealth. Protecting your loved ones.
As technology advances and more of your life ends up online, your estate plan should include provisions that dictate what you want your digital legacy to be.
Palmer & Slay’s experienced team of estate planning attorneys have helped a number of clients in the Brandon, Mississippi area draft planning documents that specify what is to be done with their digital archive and various online accounts. If this is something you are concerned or curious about, please reach out to schedule a meeting.