Mapping Your Digital Estate

A will can name who inherits the house and the bank account, but much of what most people own now sits behind a login. If nobody knows an account exists, nobody can claim it, close it or stop it billing. This chapter answers a simple question that very few households can answer today: what do you actually own online, and how would anyone else find it? Everything else in this book builds on the list you start here.

What counts as a digital asset

In the law most states now use, a digital asset is an electronic record in which a person has a right or an interest. That covers your email, your photos in cloud storage, your social media accounts, the files in your online drive, and the records of your online financial accounts. It does not by itself cover the money in those financial accounts: a brokerage account is still a brokerage account, governed by the usual rules, even if you only ever see it in an app.

It helps to think of every digital asset as two layers.

• The account is a relationship with a company, governed by its terms of service. Those terms often say the account is personal, cannot be transferred and ends when you die.
• What is inside is the content or value: the balance, the photos, the copyright in what you wrote, the coins in a wallet.

The account layer decides how hard it will be for someone else to get in. The inside layer decides whether it is worth the effort. A good plan deals with both.

Four kinds of digital property

Sorting what you own into four groups makes the list manageable and tells your executor what to do with each item.

1. Money you can see. Online-only banks and brokerages, retirement accounts with paperless statements, balances held in payment apps, cryptocurrency on an exchange or in your own wallet, gift card balances stored in an app, and rewards points or airline miles. Points and miles deserve a note: each program's own rules decide whether they can pass to an heir, and many programs say the points are not your property at all. Some will transfer them on request with a death certificate; others cancel them.

2. Things that earn. A website, a domain name, a video channel, a newsletter, an online store, ebooks, courses, apps, affiliate accounts, licensing deals. These can keep paying after you stop working, but only if someone can keep them running. Chapter 6 covers them.

3. Things that matter. Photos, videos, decades of email, journals, voice memos, documents. Their market value is usually small and their value to a family is often the largest of anything on the list. Chapter 4 covers them.

4. Things that cost. Subscriptions, auto-renewing software, cloud storage plans, domain renewals and anything else charged to a card on file. This group also hides debts: a buy-now-pay-later plan or a credit card with paperless statements may only be visible through an email inbox.

Owned versus licensed: what can actually pass on

People are often surprised that a large digital library may not be inheritable at all.

• Purchased ebooks, music, films and games are usually licences tied to your account, not copies you own. The store's terms commonly forbid transferring them. A family-sharing arrangement may let others in the household keep using them while the account stays open, but that is a feature of the service, not a legal right, and it can end.
• Items inside games are, under most publishers' terms, licensed to you rather than owned, even when players trade them for real money.
• Your own creative work is different. The copyright in photos you took, books you wrote or code you created is property. Under federal law it can pass by will like any other property, and for works created today it generally lasts for your life plus 70 years.
• Cryptocurrency you hold yourself is property controlled by whoever holds the keys. Chapter 5 explains why that makes it the easiest asset of all to lose.

When you list an item, note which of these it is. It changes what your heirs can do with it and how much effort it deserves.

The paperless problem: money nobody can find

For generations an executor found a person's accounts by reading their mail for a few months. Paperless statements removed that trail. An account that only emails its statements is invisible to a family that cannot open the email.

Accounts that nobody claims do not vanish, but they do stop working for the family. After a period with no activity set by state law, often a few years, a bank or broker must hand the balance to the state's unclaimed property program. Heirs can still claim it, usually with a death certificate and proof of their right to inherit, but in many cases the money comes back without the growth it would have earned in the meantime. The rules, the waiting periods and whether any interest is paid differ from state to state.

Take a forgotten account holding $20,000. Left where it could earn 4.0% a year, it would have grown to $24,333 over five years. If it instead sits unclaimed and is later returned at its original value, the family's cost of not knowing it existed is about $4,333, plus the time spent tracing it.

The opposite leak runs through the fourth group. Charges to a card on file keep going until someone cancels them or the card is closed, and an executor who cannot see the inbox may not know what to cancel.

A household paying $90 a month across streaming, storage, software and memberships loses $1,080 if those charges run for a year after a death before anyone finds them. Listing them now costs an afternoon, and the subscription cost calculator totals them for you.

Build the inventory, without the passwords

The inventory is a map, not a key. It says what exists and where to look, and it should never contain a password. Passwords belong in a password manager, which Chapter 3 covers; the inventory only says where the credentials live.

For each item, record:

Start in this order, because each step makes the next one easier:

1. Email accounts and your phone number. Almost every other account resets its password through email and confirms logins with a code sent to your phone. Whoever controls those two controls nearly everything else.
2. Money. Banks, brokerages, retirement accounts, payment apps, crypto.
3. Things that earn. Anything that pays you or that you pay to keep running.
4. Things that matter. Where the photos and documents actually live.
5. Things that cost. Every recurring charge.

To find what you have forgotten, search your email for words such as "statement", "receipt", "renewal" and "your account"; read three months of card and bank statements for recurring charges; scroll the saved logins in your browser or password manager; and look through the apps on your phone.

Keep the finished list somewhere your executor will find it: a copy with your will, and a copy in your password manager. A document that only you can open does not help anyone.