When most people think about estate planning, they think about houses, bank accounts, and retirement funds. Physical things with clear ownership. But a growing portion of our lives — and our assets — exists entirely online.
Your email. Your photos. Your social media accounts. Subscription services that bill monthly. Online banking and investment platforms. Cryptocurrency. Domain names. Digital businesses. Loyalty points and rewards accounts that may have real dollar value.
When you die, none of this goes away on its own. And accessing it — even for the people you trust most — is often far more difficult than accessing your physical assets.
The access problem
Your family can walk into your bank with a death certificate and eventually gain access to your accounts. They can’t do that with Google. Or Apple. Or Facebook. Or your cryptocurrency wallet.
Every digital platform has its own policies for handling deceased users’ accounts. Some will grant limited access to a verified estate representative. Some will memorialize the account but not release the contents. Some will simply delete the account after a period of inactivity. And some — particularly cryptocurrency platforms — are effectively inaccessible without the private key or password.
Without advance planning, your family may be locked out of accounts that contain important documents, irreplaceable photos, financial assets, or information they need to settle your estate.
What’s actually at stake
Financial accounts
Online-only banks, investment platforms, cryptocurrency exchanges, PayPal and Venmo balances, and digital payment accounts can hold significant value. If your family doesn’t know these accounts exist — or can’t access them — those assets may sit unclaimed indefinitely.
Cryptocurrency is especially problematic. Unlike a bank account, there’s no institution that can verify your identity and grant access to your heirs. If the private keys are lost, the assets are gone. Permanently.
Recurring charges
Subscriptions, memberships, and auto-renewing services don’t stop billing when you die. Someone needs to identify and cancel them — and they need access to your email and accounts to do it. Families have reported months of charges accumulating on a deceased person’s credit card before anyone could identify and stop all the recurring payments.
Email and documents
Your email account may contain critical information your family needs to settle your estate: account statements, correspondence with financial institutions, tax records, insurance policies. If that email account is locked behind a password nobody knows, that information is effectively lost.
Photos and memories
This one isn’t financial, but it matters. Family photos stored in iCloud, Google Photos, or on a phone that’s locked with a passcode can be permanently inaccessible without planning. For many families, losing those photos is more painful than any financial loss.
What your estate plan should include
A digital asset inventory
This doesn’t have to be complicated. A simple list of your online accounts — email providers, banking platforms, social media, subscription services, and any accounts with financial value — stored in a secure location that your executor or trustee can access. You don’t need to list every password in your will (please don’t — wills become public during probate). A password manager with a shared vault, or a sealed document stored with your estate planning attorney, works better.
A digital executor provision
Your power of attorney and your will or trust should include language that authorizes your agent, executor, or trustee to access and manage your digital accounts. Many states have adopted some version of the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, which provides a legal framework for this — but the platform still needs to cooperate, and having explicit authorization in your estate planning documents helps significantly.
Platform-specific settings
Some platforms let you designate a contact or legacy account holder in advance:
- Google has an Inactive Account Manager that lets you choose what happens to your data after a period of inactivity
- Apple has a Legacy Contact feature
- Facebook lets you designate a Legacy Contact who can manage your memorialized profile
- Password managers like 1Password and Bitwarden offer shared vaults or emergency access features
Setting these up takes a few minutes per account and saves your family hours or weeks of frustration.
On cryptocurrency specifically: If you hold crypto in any form — on an exchange, in a hardware wallet, or in a software wallet — your estate plan needs to address how your executor or trustee accesses it. This is not optional. Unlike every other asset class, crypto that can’t be accessed is crypto that’s gone forever. The private keys, seed phrases, or exchange credentials need to be documented and stored securely.
The bigger picture
Digital asset planning isn’t a separate kind of estate planning. It’s just estate planning that reflects how people actually live now. Twenty years ago, all your important documents were in a filing cabinet. Now they’re in your email. Your bank was a building downtown. Now it’s an app. Your photo albums were in a closet. Now they’re in the cloud.
A complete estate plan in 2026 needs to account for all of it — not because digital assets are exotic, but because they’re ordinary. They’re where your life actually lives.
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