Your “estate” isn’t just bricks and mortar. Increasingly, it’s also online.
What counts as a digital asset?
- Online banking and investment accounts.
- Email, social media, and cloud storage.
- Subscriptions (Netflix, Spotify, Amazon Prime).
- Loyalty points, cryptocurrency, even your iTunes library.
Why it matters: Executors can’t manage what they don’t know exists. Families risk losing money, memories, or both. And some assets (cryptocurrency, for example) are unrecoverable without logins.
The photo problem: For many families, the most treasured digital asset is photos. These are often locked in the cloud — iCloud, Google Photos, and the like. A simple login may not be enough: if the account is locked, the subscription lapses, or two-factor authentication goes to your old phone, your family may never get access. Decades of memories could vanish into the cloud — literally.
Social media & cloud accounts: Most platforms have a death policy (not what they call it, of course) hidden deep in account settings. These let you:
- Nominate a legacy contact (Apple, Google, Facebook all have versions).
- Decide whether accounts should be deleted, memorialised, or handed over.
- Allow someone to download or manage stored content.
Your executors probably don’t need access to your Netflix watch list or your Spotify playlists, but they will want your photos. As for your old dating app accounts… maybe best to make sure those are closed promptly!
Practical ideas:
- Set up legacy contacts on key accounts.
- Keep a list of accounts with your Will (no passwords — use a password manager with legacy access).
- Be clear about what you want deleted versus preserved.
Practical tip: Digital assets are easy to overlook, but often the hardest to recover — and sometimes the most emotionally valuable.
Call to action: Add your online world to your personal balance sheet — Lucy can send you our checklist.
Back to You are not Immortal – a practical guide to a delicate topic – IHT
