Digital Asset Planning: Estate Planning of the Future

As our society becomes more mobile and more dependent on technology, more and more of your lives are stored in some sort of electronic format.  Most people today have at least one email account, photos saved to a computer or posted online, various types of accounts and online memberships, as well as countless amounts of data saved on what is known as “the cloud.”

As our lives and information become increasingly digitized, the estate plans of our grandfathers and fathers become far less effective at managing our assets.   Our assets now not only include tangible items, but also digital assets.  Digital Assets include everything from hardware to social media accounts to online banking accounts to home utilities that you manage online.   Less than 30 years ago, there was no such thing as a digital asset.  Estate plans of yesteryear focused on tangible items like money, real property, vehicles, and jewelry.  While those things are still important today, and warrant consideration when making any adequate estate plan, it is also important to take stock of our digital assets.

Take a look at this example organizer to help individuals understand and organize their digital assets:  http://dig.abclocal.go.com/wls/documents/2014/wls_031414_Digital-Estate-Planning-Questionnaire.pdf.

Once you take the time to make a list of your digital assets through the use of the above form or another method of your choosing, you must decide what you want to do with these assets.  What assets do you want saved or archived, and which ones do you want deleted or erased?  Which assets should be transferred to others? Are there any assets that have extrinsic value? And what should you do with them?

In addition, to deciding what to do with your digital assets, it is important to decide who you want to handle these assets.  The person you designate to handle your digital estate is known as your digital executor.

Finally, these estate plans, should be documented and included or referenced in your other estate planning documents (i.e. a will), and made known to the person whom you name your digital executor.  While digital estate plans are not yet legally binding in North Carolina, making your wishes known about how your digital estate should be handled is becoming extremely important.  The landscape and laws regarding digital assets is as rapidly changing as the technology itself.   As more and more of our lives are conducted in electronic format, it will continue to become increasingly important to manage and plan for these assets.