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Estate Planning

What to do with your Digital Assets

January 14, 2022 by Nancy Ling


Partner Nancy Ling regularly advises clients in the practice areas of wills, trusts, estate and incapacity planning, estate administration, residential and commercial real estate, property matters, corporate transactions and business law.

In this edition of Legal Matters, Nancy talks about your digital assets and which category they would filter into when planning your estate. Whether it's a social media account or ad revenue driven by a website, they would be all accounted for when preparing your estate. 


Transcript:

When preparing your estate plan, don't forget to consider your digital assets.

Digital assets are generally sorted into three categories; those with sentimental value like photo albums or social media accounts, those with inherent value like Bitcoin, and those that generate revenue like ad revenue on a website or royalties. You may also run your business through an e-commerce platform like Etsy.

Executives face two main problems when dealing with digital assets. Firstly they need to know that they exist, and secondly, they need to know how to access them. You can make arrangements for a legacy contact to change your page to a memorial page for accounts like Facebook. You can also appoint an inactive account manager for Google accounts who will gain access to your account should you die. The digital landscape is constantly and quickly evolving; the most important thing is to leave instructions for your Executor about what digital asset you own and ideally keep those instructions up-to-date. If you have any questions, give us a call.