Digital Asset Estate Planning

There are these moments in our lives when technology changes faster than the legislation does.

While it is quite normal for most of us to download, install, and subscribe to different applications and services, we rarely bother to think about keeping track of them. We rely on a browser’s built-in password manager to remember our passwords for us and almost instantly forget about the app or the service we’ve just downloaded and subscribed to.

Although subscriptions to services such as the Internet, mobile phone, or television are often known or easy to guess, if a person passes away or is incapacitated, passwords to other services are difficult to guess. That is why one should think seriously about one’s digital estate planning, as there are currently no legal or other mechanisms that will automatically come to the rescue.

The digital landscape around us is extremely fast-changing, but this doesn’t apply to the laws and regulations concerning data and digital assets. Of course, we don't have to wait for laws and regulations to catch up with the rapidly developing digital world; we can take some easy steps to be prepared.

First, let us take a quick overview of the most important digital assets that you might want to include in your estate planning.

What are digital assets in an estate plan?

The concept of digital assets is broad and perhaps confusing to some. Put simply, these assets range from electronic records and data stored online to virtual currencies.

It’s not possible to compile a comprehensive list here, but these are the most important digital assets that you should consider:

Email accounts
Funds kept in online payment accounts
Assets stored in online trading platforms
Cryptocurrencies in crypto wallets
Online banking and financial accounts
Online subscription-based accounts
Insurance and other related accounts
Websites’ domain names
Social media accounts

Of course, we should also mention all kinds of media libraries, such as your private photo storage library, eBook library, and digital music and movie libraries.

How do you write an estate plan for digital assets?

The steps you need to take when creating your digital asset estate plan are similar to the classic one. However, it is recommended that you use special software for it to make it easier for you to catalog and keep track of all of them.

Catalog your digital assets
Make a full inventory of all your digital assets and libraries and keep the summary of that inventory with your other important inheritance documents in a secure place.

Protect your digital assets
Indicate where and how your digital assets can be found and accessed. Indicate whether some of them should be permanently deleted, and distribute the rest of the assets among your family and loved ones.

Review your beneficiaries
Make sure that you have designated the right beneficiaries to get access to the right digital assets. People sometimes overlook important details.

Appoint your fiduciaries
Digital assets, more than any other assets, need fiduciaries, such as trustees and executors, to be appointed.

Prepare your digital asset estate plan
Simply put all the information together. Organizing all your digital assets now not only makes it easier for your wishes to be followed after you pass away but is also a big help whenever you need to assess or access them.

What digital assets can you hand down through your estate plan?

We cannot make a comprehensive list of all the digital assets that can be handed down through your estate plan, but the keyword here is “own.” You can hand down assets that belong to you. Examples of such digital assets are funds in online payment accounts, stocks in online trading platforms, and company shares in equity management systems.

All digital items that are licensed, not owned, cannot be inherited or transferred to someone. The best examples of non-transferable digital assets are email and social media accounts. In this regard, the role of the estate plan is to clearly indicate who has the right to close and/or completely erase these non-transferable digital assets.

Are digital assets property?

Digital assets or digital property is any information you have created, or information about you, that exists in the digital world. That might be your Google Sheets or text stored on your computer, but it could also be scanned copies of your art collection securely stored in blockchain-based storage.

DGLegacy and digital asset estate planning

How does DGLegacy help you to prepare your digital asset estate plan?

With DGLegacy, you can easily catalog your digital assets, which enables you to protect not only them but also your loved ones should an unforeseen event happen to you.

You are able to catalog your digital, financial, and non-financial assets, designate your preferred beneficiary to them, and have them notified at the time you choose – while ensuring that your executor will know where to find your important inheritance documents.

With DGLegacy, you can protect your digital assets. Your secure document and password manager with digital inheritance also makes it easy for you to keep your list of digital assets and beneficiaries up to date.

This way, in the event of anything unforeseen happening to you, your loved ones:

Are aware of your assets
Can identify and locate all your assets
Can minimize the chance of unclaimed assets.

This is achieved with the following easy steps:

Catalog assets and passwords

Designate beneficiaries and trustees

Detecting if something happens to you

Informing your loved ones about the assigned assets and passwords

Support for your loved ones

Catalog assets and passwords

You catalog the assets and passwords that you want to protect via DGLegacy, with the minimum basic information about the assets that will allow your beneficiaries to identify and locate them.

We don’t ask for confidential information such as your bank account number, the value of your stock options, or financial account numbers!

Next step

Designate beneficiaries and trustees

Beneficiaries are the people whom you appoint to be informed about the assets and passwords that you assign to them. These are usually your partner, your children or your extended family members, such as siblings and parents.

You can choose whether the beneficiaries are to be notified at the time you create the asset or only in the case of an unforeseen event.

If your beneficiaries are, for example, elderly people or children, they might not be proficient with the type of assets assigned to them. In that case, we recommend that you assign trustees for each of your assets. If something happens to you, they can help the beneficiaries to locate their assigned assets and claim ownership.

Next step

Heartbeat protocol

The custom-engineered Heartbeat protocol of DGLegacy verifies that you are OK and detects whether anything unforeseen has happened to you.

It is a safe procedure which also aims to eliminate the possibility of false detections of unforeseen events at any cost.

This is implemented through a multistep process, described on the How It Works page.

Next step

Heartbeat protocol triggering (unforeseen event detection)

If there is no confirmation in response to any of the reminder emails or phone calls, part of the Heartbeat protocol, the system detects that an unforeseen event has happened to you.

Then the notifications which you have configured into the system about the catalogued assets and the associated beneficiaries and trustees are triggered.

Next step

Support for your loved ones

Our ultimate goal is to provide you with the right service to protect your assets and secure your loved ones’ inheritance.

Our team of experts worked with a renowned law firm to offer additional protection for your loved ones through the legal package “Guide and Inform”, part of the Platinum subscription.

In the case of an unforeseen event, the law company will engage with the beneficiaries to guide and help them in the process of claiming the assets you’ve assigned to them.

DGLegacy is great for protecting my assets and my family. So far I was storing my assets’ information on a google sheet shared with my wife, but I always worried that my assets will be lost if …

Victor

Strategic Alliances Manager - dmarcian

This is a service that could make you sleep well in a time of crisis. Knowing your family is sorted out and you have every valuable under control is priceless.

Vlad

Senior Engineering Manager - VMware

Atlanta, Georgia, United States.

Finally a peace of mind. I always wanted a tool where I could see a snapshot of my assets, track them, and decide what to share, with whom and when.
Because my assets were stored in different systems …

Ingrid Henke

Founder - ARRIVA relocation services

Berlin, Germany.

Knowing that DGLegacy exists is such a relief! Up till now, I’ve put my head in the sand when it came to thinking about my assets because it was so stressful with no real solution in sight. I ca…

Alara Vural

Founder - Alara Vural Coaching

London, UK.

I have been using a secure vault and password manager for years but I always worried that my family won’t be aware of most of this information if they need it. I really like that DGLegacy combines p…

Agnieszka Michalik

Software Architect - HERE Technologies

Berlin, Germany

DGLegacy enables me to easily track and organize all my passwords and assets.
The most important thing is that the digital inheritance capability of the service ensures that loved ones will be informe…

Stella Schmitz

International HR Executive