Who inherits your digital possessions after death?

Do you have a large itunes library? Maybe your Kindle or Nook reader has some e-books on it? Have you ever sold anything on ebay or used PayPal? Do you have a certain amount of Bitcoin? Do you have a net bank account? Do you have an email address and a Facebook account? According to a survey commissioned by McAfee at the end of 2011, Americans have an average of $54,000 trillion in digital assets, but few would take the time to set up property plans for those digital assets.

Without proper planning, your family will not be able to access and process your accounts, and those accounts may have significant emotional, practical or financial value.

If you have a Yahoo email account, it is likely that your family has not had a chance to see the mail, and that the emails have been deleted. In other cases, maybe your family will see a lot of emails you don't want them to see.

Maybe you've kept blogging for years, and when you die, your family may want to keep the blog posts you wrote as a memory of you. But if you don't have access to your account, those articles are likely to be deleted over time.

The development of digital property planning helps to avoid such problems. Remember, since digital property is legally complex, even a digital property plan does not guarantee that your desires will be fulfilled. But when your executor is managing and handling your property, digital property planning can certainly provide a great deal of help.

The problem is not just about family photos and other emotional assets. If you have a net bank account or PayPal account without a digital property plan, your executor may never know the existence of that account.

But allocating those network assets is complex, and these accounts are usually managed by terms of service. Service providers often make those agreements under federal law, allowing only authorized users to access those accounts.

In addition, most state laws do not provide specific support to executors. Even that legal existence often lags behind the current technology.

For legal reasons, the development of a digital property plan does not fully guarantee that your wishes will be fulfilled in your time.

"This is for the intricacies of the situation and I don't know if there is a perfect and comprehensive solution now," said Sharon Klein, executive director of Home Office services and Wealth strategy at Wilmington Trust, New York, Charoncrein. ”

There are many services such as accessibility Archival FX, PasswordBox and Securesafe are planning to provide an Easy-to-use network solution for digital property, from a full-featured online account asset plan to a simple password management solution.

But there are many problems with these services themselves. For example, when you die, do those companies still exist? Will its encryption methods be corrupted by spammers? Finally, you must make sure that you use an online solution or encrypted file on your home computer.

1, the development of property inventory

First, create a list of assets for your online account to let your executor know about your online assets.

"As you do with physical assets, you should make a list of assets for your account," said Alexadra Gerson, a lawyer for Helsell Fetterman in Seattle.

Remember, if you allow others to log in to your account, it violates the terms of service. But the executor may be able to deal with the property in the most advantageous manner, so there will be no problem if you wish.

Golson said: "Your executor or representative is responsible for making a list of your property, looking for and identifying the beneficiary and eventually delivering your various properties to them." Your digital account is also part of your property. ”

Your list of digital assets should include a login ID and password. "It's not good to know your account but not access them," says Klein. You should always be vigilant and keep that information in a safe and secret place. ”

You can store that information through a Web service, or store it in a safe, or store it in a CD-ROM or flash drive, or hand it over to a trusted advisor. But don't write your sign-in information in your will, because then they will become public information.

2. What kind of things do you want to happen?

Second, specify how you want to dispose of the assets. These instructions must be written more specifically.

"For example, you can say in your will, please keep my Facebook account," said Jean Gordon Carter, a property planning lawyer and partner at Hunton & Williams, North Carolina State Reilly. Delete my twitter account and LinkedIn account, which is how to extract cash from my paypal account. ”

It is important to note that your wish may be inconsistent with the service provider's policy, depending on how the service terms of each account are set, and which policies may change at any time. You'd better leave a detailed digital property plan.

In some cases, deleting an account may be the default choice. For example, Yahoo's current terms of service for e-mail accounts stipulate: "You must agree not to transfer your Yahoo account, the full rights of your Yahoo ID or any information contained in your account will be terminated after your death." After receiving your death certificate, all your accounts will be frozen and all content will be permanently deleted. ”

If that's what you want to see, don't write your account password into your property plan, and declare those accounts deleted after you die.

3. Consider any property management tools provided by the company

e-mail service providers have begun revising their policies to ease the difficulty of dealing with digital property. For example, some e-mail service providers may provide the executor with a copy of all the messages written by the deceased during their lifetime.

Google announced the launch of inactive account Manager last April and will contact your representative if it has been inactive for a certain period of time. If you have a certain type of Google account such as Gmail, Picasa, blogger and so on, you can consider choosing this service.

Klein said: "Although this work is very cumbersome, must deal with each supplier separately, this is the easiest way for you to arrange behind things." ”

4. Appoint a digital executor

You can entrust a trusted friend or relative to deal with your digital possessions. This person may be your important executor.

"If your mother doesn't know what Facebook is, you may not want to give it to her," says Golson. Sometimes it may also be important to appoint different trustees. You can appoint two executors because sometimes the ability of an executor to deal with digital assets is limited. ”

You can declare in your will that you have sufficient authority for your executor to allow them to process, maintain and delete digital assets.

It is not safe to entrust such a person. "If the terms of service go against it, does it still work?" he said. The problem has not been resolved yet. But it must be better to take a proactive part in the work and appoint someone to be executor. ”