The digital estate planning checklist your family actually needs

Most estate plans were designed for a world made of paper: a house, a car, a bank down the street, a filing cabinet. A will names an executor, the executor finds the paperwork, the paperwork points to the assets. Almost nobody's digital life fits that model, and almost nobody's will mentions it.

That is not because digital assets do not matter. It is because they are easy to forget precisely when you are planning for the one moment you will not be there to explain them. A household with no digital estate plan usually assumes there is nothing much to plan for. In practice they are holding dozens of accounts worth real money, real memories, or both.

What actually counts as a digital asset

If it has a login, it is a digital asset. Work through these categories and you will almost certainly find more than you expected.

• Financial and payment accounts: banks, brokerages, PayPal, Venmo, Cash App, and any cryptocurrency exchange or wallet.
• Income-generating accounts: a freelance profile, an Etsy or Shopify store, a YouTube channel, an ad-revenue account — anything that pays out to someone still logged in.
• Personal and sentimental accounts: email, cloud photo and video storage, social media, and any private journal or messaging app.
• Subscriptions and rewards: streaming services, software licenses, airline miles, hotel points and credit card rewards.
• Digital property: domain names, hosting accounts, a personal website or blog, and any NFTs or digital collectibles.
• The security layer underneath all of it: your password manager, your two-factor authentication app, and the backup codes for both.

The mistake that undoes most digital estate plans

The single most common error is writing account passwords directly into a will. It feels tidy — one document, everything in it — and it is precisely backwards. In most states, a will becomes a matter of public record once it is filed for probate. Anyone can request a copy from the court. A password that was private the day you wrote it is public the day it is needed.

The fix is to separate two things that people usually bundle together: legal authority and practical access. Your will or a durable power of attorney should grant a named person the legal right to deal with your digital accounts — most states have adopted a version of the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, which is the law that lets an executor or agent compel a platform to act, rather than simply logging in and hoping nobody objects. That authority belongs in a legal document, reviewed by an attorney licensed in your state. The actual list of accounts, and how to reach them, belongs somewhere private that only that person can open — not in a document a court clerk can hand to a stranger.

It is also worth updating a power of attorney, not just a will. A will only ever takes effect after death. If you are unreachable because you are incapacitated rather than deceased, only a power of attorney with explicit digital-asset language lets someone act on your behalf while you are still alive.

The legacy tools platforms already give you

Several major platforms have built a version of this in, and almost nobody turns it on. None of them replace a full plan, but each one closes a real gap for free in about five minutes.

• Google's Inactive Account Manager lets you choose trusted contacts who are notified after a set period of inactivity, and decide exactly what they can access — or have the account deleted automatically instead.
• Apple's Legacy Contact generates an access key during setup. After a death certificate is provided, the named person can request access to most of that Apple ID's data.
• Meta's Legacy Contact (for Facebook and Instagram) lets a chosen person manage a memorialized profile — pinning a tribute post, updating the profile photo, and responding to new friend requests — without ever seeing private messages.

The working checklist

This is the order we would actually do it in. None of it requires writing a single password into a document someone else will eventually file with a court.

1. List every financial and payment account by institution name only — banks, brokerages, PayPal, Venmo, crypto exchanges. Not the password, just that the account exists.
2. Note where your password manager's master credential lives and who has emergency access to it, rather than exporting and storing individual passwords in plain text.
3. Store two-factor authentication backup codes somewhere separate from the password manager itself, so a single point of failure cannot lock everyone out at once.
4. Treat cryptocurrency seed phrases as their own category. Possessing the phrase means owning the funds, so decide deliberately how a trusted person could recover it — never simply paste it into a shared note or an unencrypted file.
5. List every domain, hosting account and website you run, with the registrar, the renewal date and who currently pays the bill.
6. Inventory recurring subscriptions and memberships so they can be cancelled deliberately instead of quietly running for years against a card someone forgot to close.
7. Write down which loyalty and rewards programs you belong to, so miles and points can actually be claimed within the program's deadline.
8. Turn on the built-in legacy contact feature for Google, Apple and Meta accounts — five minutes each, and each one closes a real gap.
9. Add explicit digital-asset language to your will and your power of attorney, drafted or reviewed by an estate attorney licensed in your state.
10. Tell one person, in plain language, that this record exists and roughly what it covers. A complete record nobody knows about helps no one.

We could plan the funeral. We could not get into the account holding fifteen years of her photos, because the recovery email was an inbox that had also been closed. It took Apple eleven weeks and a death certificate to let us back in.

Keep it current

A digital estate plan decays faster than a paper one, because accounts open, close and change passwords all year round. Revisit it on a fixed date rather than waiting for a prompt: add new accounts as you open them, remove ones you have closed, and reconfirm that the person named in your will and power of attorney is still the right person.

This is exactly the gap between a legal document and a household vault. The will or power of attorney establishes who has the right to act. A private, encrypted record — updated in minutes rather than redrafted by an attorney — is where the actual inventory of accounts, subscriptions and instructions belongs, visible only to the people you have specifically chosen to see it.