Your Digital Life Is Worth More Than You Think: Why Estate Planning Must Include Your Online Assets

Can you list everything you own?

Most people think of their assets as the physical or the tangible: a house, a car, the retirement accounts, maybe a life insurance policy. The lawyers draws up the will, you beneficiaries are named, and the job feels done.

But there is an big miss here. Its no not because attorneys overlook it, and not because families don't care.

This miss is because most people simply don't think of their online accounts as property.

They are and in many cases, they're worth more than anyone realizes.

The Inventory No One Has Done

Take five minutes and try to list every account you have online.

Start with the obvious: email, social media, maybe a bank account you access through a website. Now keep going. The streaming subscriptions — Netflix, Spotify, HBO, Apple TV+. The airline miles account that have been accumulating for years. The hotel loyalty program. The Venmo or PayPal balance. The Amazon account with a gift card balance you forgot about.

The photos stored in iCloud or Google Photos — ten, fifteen, twenty years of your family's life. The domain name you bought for a business idea that never launched. The eBay seller account. The Etsy shop. The freelance writing published on Medium that still generates a few dollars a month.

If you have any involvement in cryptocurrency — even just a small holding from years ago — add that to the list.

Most people who do this exercise are surprised by how long the list gets. And they're more surprised when they start to think about what happens to all of it when they die.

What is a "Digital Asset"?

A digital asset can be any account that exists in digital form and carries some sort of value — financial, sentimental, or practical.

Complicating this, the laws concerning digital assets in the context of estate administration have significantly changed over the past decade, and continue to change .

The big change is the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act — RUFADAA, now adopted in some form by most U.S. states including Pennsylvania — which gives executors/trustees legal authority to access many categories of digital accounts as part of estate administration.

But legal authority and practical access are two different things.

RUFADAA tells an executor they can access an account. It doesn't tell them the password. It doesn't unlock a phone. It doesn't recover a cryptocurrency wallet from a hardware device with no documented seed phrase. It doesn't compel a platform to cooperate on a reasonable timeline when the platform's policy and the legal standard are in tension.

Big tech doesn't make this easier either; they tend to hold to the highest standard regardless of where you live.

The practical gap between the legal right to access and the actual ability to do so — is where estates get stuck. The good news is that a lot of the headache is almost entirely preventable with planning.

Categories That a Lot of Estate Plans Miss

Here's the list, and an explanation of why each one matters.

Digital Financial Accounts

Bank accounts that are online only, retirement or brokerage accounts, services such as PayPal, Venmo, Cash App --- all of these may hold significant balances.

Without the username and password (and often Multifactor Authentication) , an executor may spend months establishing legal authority with each platform individually — and some platforms have policies that make this genuinely difficult even with proper documentation. Google, Microsoft, Apple all make this very difficult requiring Letters Testamentary or Administration, death certificates,

Loyalty points and rewards balances

This includes Airline miles, hotel points, credit card rewards and are transferable and can be worth real cash money. A frequent business person might have several hundred thousand airline miles (or even millions) — worth thousands of dollars in travel value — sitting in an account no one else knows how to access. Most loyalty programs have death transfer policies. These are rarely invoked.

Cryptocurrency

This deserves its own article as it is a complex topic. The short version: cryptocurrency holdings are only accessible through private keys or seed phrases. If those are lost, the holdings are functionally gone — permanently. There is no customer service number, no court order or any other way to recover those holdings.If it isn't documented, its gone

Digital Assets

Domain names, websites, online stores, Substack publications, YouTube channels with monetization enabled, Patreon accounts all have the potential to generate revenue. If these revenue — even modest monthly income — they are business assets with real value, that are part of the estate.

Digital Property

Digital publications, online course material, digital art, licensed photography, music recordings, published writing. These generate royalties and the copyright survives death. But if no one knows where the files are, who the licensing partners are, or how to access the accounts, the income stream dies with the creator even though the legal right to it doesn't. Even NPT's - those associated with other assets - may have residual value even though that market has collapsed.

Social media and personal accounts

These may have limited financial value, but they carry enormous sentimental value and present real practical challenges. What happens to a Facebook account with fifteen years of photos and messages? What becomes of an Instagram account with a large following? Who can manager it? Policies vary widely, and most families discover this only after the fact, when the accounts are already locked and the grief is fresh and dealing with the physical assets, the family and the state.

Cloud storage

iCloud, Google Drive, Google Photos, Dropbox, Box, OneDrive, etc.. These often contain the only copies of documents, photos, and records that no one has thought to back up anywhere else. Platform access policies after death are inconsistent. Apple has a Legacy Contact feature that allows pre-designated access — but it has to be set up before death to work.

What "Forgetting" This Actually Costs

The consequences of not planning for digital assets are not abstract; they can and do show up in real ways :

• An executor spends six months and thousands of dollars in legal fees establishing authority to access accounts that could have been documented in an afternoon.

• Cryptocurrency holding worth tens of thousands of dollars is permanently inaccessible because the wallet credentials weren't documented anywhere the family could find and no court in the world can force access.

• Decades of family photographs are tied to a phone number that no longer rings — and the cloud storage provider won't release them to anyone, regardless of the documentation presented.

• An online business that makes money — a store, a newsletter, a YouTube channel — stops generating income the day the owner dies because no one had the credentials to log in and no succession plan existed. The cash is in the ether.

• Social media accounts with a hundred thousand followers now dormant, or worse, gets hacked after the owner's death because no one knew to secure it. Also potentially worth cash.

All of this can be accounted for and capture, with purposeful planning.

Three Things Every Estate Plan Should Now Include

You don't need a technology background to address digital assets in estate planning.

You need three things:

Inventory of Assets (Digital)

A list of every account, platform, subscription, and digital property — what it is, where it is, what it's worth (even approximately), and whether it has financial, sentimental, or practical value.

In a spreadsheet or an application; or even an application with the data in escrow. The key is to have enough information that an executor can identify what exists and begin the access process.

Review and update it annually. Your digital life changes faster than your physical one.

Related to this, consider making sure the phone account stays active so you can use the MFA - but you'll need the phones passcode.

Credential management system

Passwords, security questions, two-factor authentication methods, and — critically for cryptocurrency — seed phrases and private keys. These should be stored somewhere accessible to your executor under appropriate legal authority, but not so accessible that they're a security risk during your lifetime.

A properly configured password manager, combined with documented instructions about how to access it, is often the right answer. We'll cover the options in depth in a future piece.

Explicit instructions in your estate documents

Your will (and any trust documents) should explicitly reference the inventories digital assets and name who has authority to access them, in what order, and for what purposes.

In states that have adopted RUFADAA, your documents can also specify whether you want a fiduciary to have expanded or restricted access beyond the statutory default — which matters more than most people realize.

If you have a digital executor — someone specifically tasked with managing the digital estate — name them. Give them explicit authority. Make sure they have the technical comfort level to use it.

A Note for Attorneys

If you're an estate planning attorney reading this: your clients almost certainly have significant undocumented digital assets, and most of them have never been asked about it.

A handful of targeted questions in the intake process — Do you hold cryptocurrency? Do you have any accounts that generate income online? Do you have cloud storage accounts with photos or documents that aren't backed up elsewhere? — will surface these issues before they become estate administration problems.

The intersection of RUFADAA, digital forensics, and estate planning is increasingly where complex probate matters get resolved or contested. Understanding it — or having a forensic resource you can call when a matter turns on access to a locked device or a digital account — is becoming a practical necessity for estate practitioners.

Lovtaler works with law firms and courts to provide forensic support when access to devices and digital accounts becomes a legal matter rather than a technical one. If that's useful context for your practice, we're glad to talk through how it works.

Where to Start

If you've read this far and realized your own digital estate is undocumented, here's where to start:

Start the inventory. Don't wait until it's complete to take the next step. An incomplete list you actually have is more valuable than a perfect list you haven't started.

Tell your attorney. Forward them this article if it helps frame the conversation. Ask whether your current documents address digital assets explicitly.

Setup Legacy Access.- It's straightforward to set up Apple Legacy Contact or Google Inactive Account Manager. These are free, take just a few minutes to configure, and solve a significant percentage of the access problems families face with the most commonly used platforms.

Talk to your Executor. Make sure the person you've designated to administer your estate knows that digital assets exist, knows roughly where to look, and knows who to call if they encounter a locked device or a cryptocurrency wallet.

The goal isn't a perfect digital estate plan. The goal is one that gives the people you trust enough information to do their jobs when the time comes.