When people think about estate planning, they typically think about real estate, bank accounts, and retirement funds. But for most of us today, a significant portion of our lives — and our financial activity — exists entirely online. And most estate plans are completely silent about it.
What’s Actually at Stake
The term “digital assets” covers more than it might seem. It includes the obvious things: online bank accounts, brokerage accounts managed through web portals, and cryptocurrency. But it also includes email accounts, cloud storage full of photos and documents, social media profiles, small business websites, domain names, online stores, and digital files with sentimental or commercial value.
It also includes something people rarely consider: the subscriptions and memberships that renew automatically every month. A family going through estate administration has enough to handle. Discovering six months later that they’ve been paying for streaming services, software licenses, or a storage account they didn’t know existed adds unnecessary cost and frustration to an already difficult process.
Why Traditional Estate Plans Don’t Cover This
Most estate planning documents were written before digital life existed in its current form. A will might authorize a personal representative to “collect and distribute assets,” but that language doesn’t automatically give anyone legal authority to access a Google account or a cryptocurrency wallet.
Federal law — specifically the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act — can actually make it illegal to access someone’s accounts without authorization, even after death and even with good intentions. Without explicit legal authority, your family’s well-meaning efforts to access your accounts could run into both legal and practical walls.
Maryland has adopted the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, which gives fiduciaries — your executor, trustee, or agent under a power of attorney — the legal right to access digital assets, but only if your estate planning documents expressly grant that authority. Without that language, the default rules apply, and those rules are far more restrictive.
What a Complete Plan Includes
Updating your plan for the digital age doesn’t require a complete overhaul. It does require a few specific steps.
First, your power of attorney and trust documents should include explicit language authorizing your fiduciary to access, manage, and close digital accounts. Without this, even clearly authorized people can find platforms refusing to cooperate.
Second, you need a practical inventory. Not a list of passwords in your will — wills become public record, and you don’t want your login credentials filed with the court. Instead, a separate, secure document — stored with your estate plan or in a password manager — that your trusted people know how to find and access.
Third, think about what you actually want to happen to each type of account. Some platforms allow you to designate a “legacy contact” who can memorialize or close your account. Others have no such option. Cryptocurrency requires particular care — without access to private keys or recovery phrases, those assets may be permanently inaccessible.
The digital piece of your estate plan is not an add-on. For many families, it’s where a significant portion of their financial and personal life now lives. Treating it that way — with the same intentionality as your home or your retirement account — is what a complete, modern estate plan looks like.
We can help! If you’re ready to get started on your planning, begin by booking a Peace of Mind Planning Session. We’ll answer your questions, go over your options, and talk about our flat fees. Mention this Article and we’ll waive the $300 session fee: