If you read our earlier piece on why an estate plan has an expiration date, you already know the argument: the documents in that binder reflect a single moment, not an ongoing life. Marriages, children, executors who move away or pass on, a net worth that has grown or shifted. All of it drifts away from what the plan assumes, quietly, until someone finally checks.
There is one part of that drift that almost nobody accounts for, because it did not exist when most people’s estate plans were drafted. It is everything you own, owe, or control that lives online.
Email accounts. Cloud storage with decades of family photos. Domain names for a business. Loyalty and rewards balances that are worth more than people assume. And increasingly, for a meaningful number of our clients, cryptocurrency and other digital holdings that represent real, sometimes significant value and have no paper trail at all.
An estate plan written five or ten years ago was not built with any of this in mind. That is not a criticism of the document. It is simply a gap that needs to be closed, the same way a move, a divorce, or a new grandchild needs to be reflected in updated documents.
Why This Gap Matters More for Some of Our Clients Than Others
For a lot of families, digital assets mean sentimental things: photos, an old email account, a social media profile. Important to preserve, but not financially urgent.
For business owners and for the tech executives and founders we work with, the picture is different. Equity that vests digitally, business assets that exist only as domains and cloud infrastructure, and cryptocurrency holdings that in some cases sit alongside, or even rival, more traditional parts of a balance sheet. If a family does not know a wallet exists, or does not have the credentials to access it, that value can be functionally lost the moment its owner is no longer there to explain where it is.
This is also a relevant conversation for anyone who has recently made the move from Connecticut to Florida, or is considering it. A change in domicile is already a moment that should trigger a full review of your estate documents, as we have written about before. Digital assets and fiduciary access laws vary by state just as tax and residency rules do, which makes a move exactly the right moment to fold this into that broader review rather than treating it separately.
Three Steps Worth Taking Now
- Name legacy contacts on the platforms that allow it. Apple, Google, and Facebook each let you designate someone who can access specific account information, or manage the account, after death or an extended period of inactivity. It takes a few minutes, it costs nothing, and it is one of the only digital-asset steps that does not require an attorney.
- Bring this into the conversation with your estate planning attorney, explicitly. The law here is still developing and differs by state, including how and whether fiduciaries are granted access to digital accounts. Do not assume a will written before crypto or cloud accounts were common already covers this. It is worth asking your attorney directly whether your documents address digital assets and fiduciary access under the law in your state.
- Build an actual inventory, not a mental one. A real, maintained list of online banking and investment logins, crypto wallets and exchanges, domains, and any business-critical accounts, stored in a reputable password manager. The goal is not just that this information exists somewhere. It is that a spouse, an adult child, or a trustee actually knows it exists and can find it when they need to, without having to guess at usernames or track down a password reset on an account tied to an email they can no longer access.
This Belongs in the Same Conversation as the Rest of Your Plan
Digital assets are not a separate category to handle on the side. They are simply part of what you have built, the same as a brokerage account or a piece of real estate, and they deserve the same attention the next time your estate plan comes up for review. If it has been a few years since that conversation happened, or if it has never specifically covered what lives online, that is worth raising directly with your advisor and your attorney.
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