The digital estate planning checklist — because your will doesn't cover 200 logins

Picture the person who would settle your affairs if something happened to you tomorrow. Maybe it's your spouse, your sister, your adult kid. Now hand them your life as it actually exists: two email addresses, a bank you've only ever visited through an app, a brokerage account, twenty years of family photos in the cloud, a domain name that auto-renews to a card they can't access, a crypto wallet with a seed phrase you've never spoken aloud, and a couple hundred logins protected by a password manager they don't know exists — behind a phone they can't unlock.

Traditional estate planning has this problem mostly solved for physical things. The will names who gets the house. The deed, the titles, and the beneficiary forms do the paperwork. But the average person now carries a second, invisible estate made of accounts — and for most families, nothing covers the logins.

The result isn't hypothetical. Families lose photo libraries because nobody could get into a cloud account. Small online businesses go dark because a domain lapsed. Crypto becomes permanently unreachable — industry estimates suggest a meaningful share of all Bitcoin is already lost forever, much of it to exactly this failure. And grieving relatives spend months on the phone with support departments that are legally required to tell them no.

Digital estate planning is the fix, and it is far less morbid and far more doable than it sounds. This guide walks through what it is, then gives you the full checklist — six steps you can genuinely finish in a weekend.

Inventory every account — yes, even the loyalty points

Start with a plain list. Not passwords yet — just what exists and where. The goal is that your executor never has to guess whether there's a second brokerage account or wonder which cloud service holds the baby photos.

Work through categories rather than trying to remember accounts cold. A useful pass looks like this:

Two categories deserve special care. Email first: your primary inbox is the master key to everything else, because it's where every other account sends its password resets. If your executor can reach your email, half the estate unlocks itself; if they can't, almost nothing does. Crypto second: self-custodied wallets have no support line and no recovery process. If the seed phrase dies with you, the asset is gone — not frozen, gone.

Don't skip the small stuff. Airline miles and hotel points are often transferable to family if someone claims them (policies vary, so note the program). Domains and hosting quietly expire and can be bought by strangers. And subscriptions keep billing a dead person's card for years — listing them is a gift to whoever has to cancel them.

Document access for your executor — never in the will itself

Here's the trap well-meaning people fall into: they type their passwords into the will. Don't. When a will goes through probate, it typically becomes part of the public court record — readable by anyone who cares to look. A will with your banking password in it is a published invitation.

There's a second problem: wills are static. You'll change your email password a dozen times between now and whenever the will is read. A password written in a legal document is stale within months.

The right structure splits the job in two. The will (or trust) carries the authority: language authorizing your executor to access and manage your digital assets, and a pointer that a secure inventory exists. A separate, secure, updatable store carries the access: a password manager's emergency access feature, an encrypted vault, or at minimum a sealed letter in a safe-deposit box — anything that can be kept current without lawyers involved.

The honest test of whether this layer works is simple, and most households fail it today: could your spouse actually get into your accounts right now, with you unavailable? If the answer is "sort of, if they guessed the phone PIN," step three is where your weekend goes.

Two details people forget: device passcodes (a phone or laptop PIN gates everything on the device, including the authenticator app) and two-factor codes (if your executor has the password but the 2FA codes go to a locked phone, they're still stuck — document backup codes too).

The full digital estate planning checklist

Everything above, condensed into the six boxes to tick. Print it, or better, work through it with your partner on a Sunday afternoon:

• 1. Inventory every account
  Financial, email, cloud photos and files, domains, crypto, subscriptions, loyalty programs, social profiles, and device PINs. List what exists and where — the map comes before the keys.
• 2. Turn on legacy contacts
  Apple Legacy Contact, Google Inactive Account Manager, Facebook memorialization settings, and any equivalent on platforms you rely on. Free, official, five minutes each.
• 3. Document access — outside the will
  Store credentials, backup codes, and seed phrases in a secure, updatable place. The will authorizes your executor and points to the store; it never contains a password, because probate makes wills public.
• 4. Decide per-account wishes
  For each account: close it, memorialize it, or transfer it. The photo library transfers to family; the dormant forum account closes; the Facebook profile memorializes. Write the wish next to the account in your inventory.
• 5. Review it yearly
  Accounts appear, passwords rotate, platforms change their tools. A stale plan fails almost as badly as no plan. Pick a fixed date — a birthday, New Year's, tax day — and give it twenty minutes.
• 6. Tell one trusted person where the map lives
  The most complete plan on earth is worthless if nobody knows it exists. One sentence to one person: "If anything happens to me, the account map is here, and here's how you open it."

Common questions

• What is digital estate planning?
  Digital estate planning is deciding what happens to your online accounts and digital assets — email, photos, financial logins, domains, crypto, social profiles — after you die or become incapacitated, and giving someone you trust both the legal authority and the practical access to carry those wishes out.
• Should I put my passwords in my will?
  No. A will typically becomes part of the public court record when it goes through probate, so anything written in it can be read by strangers. Keep passwords in a separate, secure place — a password manager or encrypted vault — and let the will simply authorize your executor to access them.
• What happens to my online accounts when I die?
  It depends on each platform's terms of service and your state's law. Some accounts can be memorialized, some can be closed by next of kin with a death certificate, and many are simply frozen. Under the RUFADAA-style laws adopted in most US states, a fiduciary can access digital assets far more easily if you've authorized it in your estate documents or through the platform's own legacy tools.
• How do I set up a legacy contact on my iPhone or Google account?
  On Apple devices, add a Legacy Contact in your Apple Account settings under Sign-In & Security; your contact receives an access key they can use, along with a death certificate, to request your data. For Google, turn on Inactive Account Manager, choose a waiting period, and pick who gets notified and which data they can download. Each takes about five minutes.