Most people spend more time managing their digital lives than they realize: email, banking, photos, social media, cryptocurrency, subscriptions, even game accounts or domain names. Yet almost none of that gets mentioned in a traditional will or trust.
If something happens to you, your family may not just be grieving, they may be locked out, spending months proving to a tech company that they have the right to access or transfer an account that belonged to you.
Why This Is a Bigger Problem Than It Used To Be
A generation ago, an executor could handle “assets” with a death certificate and some paperwork. Digital assets don’t work that way. They’re often protected by:
- Federal privacy law, which can prevent providers from turning over account contents without specific authorization
- Terms of service that make many accounts technically non-transferable, even after death
- Encryption and two-factor authentication that no court order can bypass if no one has the credentials
A family can have full legal authority as executor or heir and still be unable to get into a crucial account.
What Typically Falls Through the Cracks
- Email accounts often the “master key” to resetting passwords on everything else
- Online banking and investment accounts with no paper statements
- Cryptocurrency wallets if private keys aren’t accessible, the assets are effectively gone forever
- Cloud-only photo and video libraries
- Social media accounts which families often want memorialized or removed
- Subscription and loyalty accounts with real dollar value
- Domain names and website, especially for business owners
How Georgia Law Addresses This
Georgia has adopted a version of the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (RUFADAA), which gives your named fiduciary a legal path to access digital assets but only if your documents grant that authority. Without specific language, providers often refuse access or offer only deletion instead of transfer.
What a Solid Digital Asset Plan Includes
1. Express authorization language in your will, trust, and powers of attorney naming who can access digital assets and what they can do with them
2. A private, secured inventory of accounts and access methods, kept separate from the will, which becomes a public record once filed
3. Provider-level tools, like Google’s Inactive Account Manager or Facebook’s legacy contact, used alongside your legal documents
4. A clear plan for cryptocurrency and hardware wallets, which have no institutional backstop if access is lost
5. Instructions for business-related digital assets, domains, business email, cloud storage, client systems
The Bottom Line
Digital assets are still assets. If your estate plan hasn’t been updated to address them, your family could face locked accounts, lost photos, or unrecoverable funds at the worst possible time. A short conversation now, reviewing your accounts and building the right authorization language into your documents can prevent a genuinely painful mess later. Visit us at www.ditchenlaw.com.
This article is for general informational purposes and does not constitute legal advice. Every estate plan should be tailored to your individual circumstances.
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