Preparing Your Digital Legacy - Prime of Life Tech

older man and younger woman talking and using a laptop computer

In helping my older adult clients manage and learn about technology I have noticed a worrisome trend: people aren’t including their digital assets during estate planning preparations, despite having a will, trust, and powers of attorney in place. Usually, the recognition of what is missing only becomes clear when a spouse, parent, or another loved one has died.

Our estate plans must document key aspects of our digital lives – access codes to smartphones, tablets, and computers, passwords, and online accounts. We also need a digital executor to honor our wishes for our digital assets. Let’s discuss including our digital legacy as part of estate planning.

Make a Plan for Your Digital Assets

Your digital assets are the online accounts, emails, files, photos, documents, social media accounts, and other artifacts of our digital life. What should happen to these things after you’ve died? How will your survivors access these artifacts and accounts to fulfill your wishes?

Digital estate planning begins with documenting your digital assets and deciding how you want them managed after your death. We leave instructions for a digital executor stating how we want our digital legacy managed.

We must organize our assets and document our wishes so our survivors can faithfully execute our instructions. Should your Facebook account live on? What subscriptions are associated with your Apple or Google ID that need canceling? Should your survivors enable forwarding rules for your emails? These are the kinds of questions we need to answer when digital estate planning.

Identify a Digital Executor

Carefully consider who in your family could most easily manage your digital assets should you become disabled or die. Who among your survivors is best equipped to manage your online accounts, social media accounts, email, and archive documents and files? Whomever we choose, we can make their job much easier by organizing, documenting, and reviewing the information with them.

Organize Your Passwords

Passwords are keys to our digital kingdoms and must be accessible to our digital executor. Document the unlock code for your phone, passwords for your computer, major online accounts like Apple and Google, online brokerage, banking, online bill pay, and other online accounts. We have so many passwords that a password manager is essential to keeping them organized and accessible after our death. Several free and paid versions are available, including Keychain on Apple devices and the Google Password Manager.

Mobile Phones

Smartphones are essential tools for managing our digital lives. We use them to communicate by email, texting, and calling, and conduct personal business with them using apps and online services. We must provide our digital executor with the ability to access our phone for as long as necessary after we’ve died for various reasons:

Notifying contacts we have passed.
Canceling subscriptions associated with our Google or Apple ID.
Receiving text messages with one-time passwords (i.e. “codes”) for accessing online accounts or resetting a lost password for a deceased loved one’s accounts.

Major Online Accounts

Apple, Google, and social media accounts like Facebook have digital legacy features to specify a contact – our digital executor – to whom we grant permission to manage these accounts after our death. Leave instructions for your digital executor indicating how you want your accounts managed after you’re gone.

Your digital executor can monitor your email for bills, statements, and subscription notifications, and take appropriate action.

Account Recovery Methods

Assign mobile phone numbers and alternate email addresses to your major online accounts like Apple, Google, and Facebook. Doing so enables you to receive links or one-time passwords (“codes”) to reset forgotten or undocumented passwords or for two-factor authentication to verify your identity. Several recent clients were locked out of email accounts because of forgotten and undocumented passwords and no recovery methods set up.

Use your phone number and an alternate email address if you have one, along with a spouse’s, partner’s, or other family member’s phone number and email address when adding account recovery methods. Multiple recovery methods ensure that many options are available to access the account.

Subscriptions

Document your digital and other subscriptions so your digital executor knows what to cancel after you have died. Digital subscriptions for apps, streaming services, news, music, and other online services need cataloging, and the corresponding logins recorded in your password manager. Organizing this information enables your digital executor to manage, transfer, or cancel your subscriptions after you have passed.

Taking time to organize and document your digital life will better enable you and your loved ones to manage these assets now and in the future – especially during major health events and eventually end of life.

A version of this post appears in the September 2024 edition of Prime Time News.