SECURING YOUR DIGITAL LEGACY

In the 2020s, the executor of your estate is likely to have an expanded role to play

- Sharon Hartung

I am a technology management advisor who now works in the estate planning field, helping estate advisors figure out how to deal with the digital lives and digital footprints of the recently deceased, which has made me all too familiar with how the digital world has permeated our lives. We all now own a new set of assets, digital assets, that include our email, loyalty points, online access, social media accounts, gaming points, travel rewards, and, in some cases, our crypto-currency assets.

Similar to physical assets, digital assets must be accounted for in estate planning because they have either financial or emotional value. Lots of us save up loyalty points in a variety of programs, and if we don’t get around to using them before we die, we likely have wishes about who should get them. Those wishes need to be documented the same way we document our wishes for our physical assets. All of our assets, digital and physical, should be inventoried, expressed, and captured in our will and estate documents.