How to Include Digital Assets in Your Estate Plan

Most estate plans are years behind the reality of how people actually own things today. Wills drafted a decade ago say nothing about cryptocurrency. Healthcare directives don't mention what to do with a Google account. And almost nobody has written down where their digital photos live or how to access them.

This is increasingly a real problem. Digital assets — in some families — represent meaningful money. Even when they don't, they represent irreplaceable things: decades of photos, communications with people who are gone, accounts that represent who someone was. Getting them into your estate plan isn't complicated, but it requires knowing what you have and understanding a few legal realities that most people don't know about.

What Counts as a Digital Asset

The definition is broader than most people think. Here's a practical inventory of what falls under the category:

Financial value:

• Cryptocurrency (Bitcoin, Ethereum, stablecoins, and anything else)
• NFTs and other blockchain-based assets
• Online brokerage or trading accounts
• PayPal, Venmo, Cash App balances
• Reward points, airline miles, hotel points (often worth hundreds or thousands of dollars)
• Domain names (which can have significant resale value)
• Monetized content — YouTube channels, Substack publications, digital products

Accounts and access:

• Email accounts (Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail)
• Social media accounts (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X)
• Cloud storage (Google Drive, iCloud, Dropbox)
• Password managers
• Streaming subscriptions (Netflix, Spotify, Amazon)
• Shopping accounts (Amazon, eBay, Etsy seller accounts)

Sentimental or irreplaceable:

• Digital photos — especially those stored in the cloud or on devices
• Videos
• Digital journals or writing
• Text and message histories

Not all of these need to go through formal estate planning. Streaming subscriptions, for example, are non-transferable by their terms of service and just need to be cancelled. But the financial assets require active planning, and the sentimental ones require active documentation, or they simply disappear.

The Legal Problem With Password Sharing After Death

Here's something most families don't know: it's technically illegal under federal law for someone to log into your accounts using your credentials after you die, even if you gave them the password.

The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and the Stored Communications Act — laws written for a different era — can be interpreted to prohibit unauthorized account access, and "unauthorized" is often defined by the platform's terms of service. Most platforms' terms of service say accounts are non-transferable and that credentials can only be used by the account holder.

In practice, nobody is prosecuting grieving spouses for accessing their partner's Gmail. But there are real, practical consequences: platforms can permanently delete accounts when they discover the account holder has died, cutting off access to everything inside. And if there's ever a dispute — say, between family members over the contents of an account — the legal murkiness makes things complicated.

The better path is to use the tools platforms actually provide. Apple has a Legacy Contact feature that lets named people request access to your Apple ID after death. Google has an Inactive Account Manager that can automatically share access or delete data according to your instructions. Facebook has a memorialization and legacy contact feature. Using these features creates clear, legally sound access — not a workaround.

For accounts that don't have built-in inheritance tools, an estate attorney can include specific language in your will or trust authorizing your executor to access digital accounts. Some states have passed versions of the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (RUFADAA), which gives executors legal authority to access digital assets — but only if the will explicitly authorizes it.

The takeaway: don't rely on password sharing as your estate plan for digital assets.

How to Handle Crypto Specifically

Cryptocurrency is unlike any other digital asset because there is no customer service department. If you hold cryptocurrency in a self-custody wallet — meaning you control the private keys, not an exchange — and those keys are lost, the crypto is gone. Permanently. There is no password reset. There is no support ticket. It's gone.

This has happened to real families. Significant amounts of Bitcoin have been permanently inaccessible because the holder died without leaving their private keys in a form their heirs could find.

If you own cryptocurrency, here's what your estate plan needs to address:

Exchange-held crypto: If your crypto is held on an exchange like Coinbase or Kraken, your estate can contact the exchange after your death and transfer ownership through a standard estate process. The key is making sure your executor knows the account exists and can provide the necessary documentation. Add this to your asset inventory.

Self-custody wallets: If you hold a hardware wallet (Ledger, Trezor) or a software wallet, access depends on either the private key or the seed phrase (also called a recovery phrase — typically 12 or 24 words). Your executor needs this to access the funds.

Storing the seed phrase is a security problem: whoever has it has access to your funds, immediately, without any verification. The options:

• Store it in a fireproof safe with access instructions in your will
• Use a multi-signature setup where multiple keys are required for access
• Use a secure document service that releases access upon death
• Store it with an estate attorney in a sealed envelope

Whatever you do, document it in a way your executor can find and act on. The seed phrase itself should never be in your will, which becomes a public document after probate. Instructions for how to find and use it should be in a private document that your executor can access.

One more thing on crypto: the IRS treats cryptocurrency as property. Your executor will need to report it, and your heirs may owe capital gains taxes depending on the asset's cost basis. Include this in your tax planning.

Password Managers and Estate Planning

A password manager is the right tool for managing your digital life. For estate planning purposes, it creates both a solution and a challenge.

The solution: your password manager stores all your login credentials in one place. If your executor can get into it, they can get into everything.

The challenge: your executor needs the master password — and unlike other credentials, this one you should not store in the password manager itself.

The practical approach: write down your password manager master password (and any required two-factor authentication recovery codes) and store them somewhere physically secure — a fireproof safe, a sealed envelope with your attorney, or a secure document your executor can access. Include instructions for which email address the account is registered to and which device has it installed.

1Password and Bitwarden both have emergency access features that let you designate someone who can request access to your vault after a waiting period. Enable these features and designate your spouse, executor, or a trusted family member. This creates a legitimate access path that doesn't require physically sharing your master password today.

How to Document Digital Assets Without Creating a Security Risk

The goal here is a contradiction: you need enough information to be findable and actionable, but not so much information that it creates a security risk if the document falls into the wrong hands.

The way to resolve this is to separate the what from the how.

In a document your executor can find (and that you reference in your will), list:

• What digital assets you have (accounts, cryptocurrency, domain names)
• Where those assets are held (which exchange, which wallet type, which platform)
• What the approximate value is, where applicable
• Who should receive them
• The general instructions for accessing them (e.g., "seed phrase is in the fireproof safe in the primary bedroom, in the red envelope")

The actual credentials, seed phrases, and passwords stay in a separate, secure location that you reference but don't include in the document itself.

Golden Wealth's document vault gives you a structured way to organize this — you can document what you have and provide instructions without putting sensitive credentials in an open document. Your family can access what they need to know without you leaving your private keys sitting in an unsecured file.

Review this document once a year. Digital assets change faster than any other part of a personal balance sheet — accounts get opened and closed, cryptocurrency gets moved, new platforms emerge. An outdated digital asset inventory is almost as bad as none at all.

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If you've been putting off getting your digital assets documented, you're not alone. Start with what you have — Golden Wealth makes it easy to organize everything in one place.

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