Michigan Estate Planning Blog

Planning for Your Digital Assets Saginaw, MI

Back in the day, there were checkbooks, stock and bond certificates and hardcopy statements showing your dividends and interest. Then again, there were only a handful of television viewing options, a test pattern at the end of the broadcast day and the youngest sibling was the “remote control” to change channels. Now, most of life is digital, to include your estate. What planning have you done for your digital assets? Would your love ones be able to navigate the system of digital accounts, portals and passwords when needed? The conundrum of how to understand and plan for the maintenance of a digital life is not new, but it is growing. Everyone – people of all walks of life – has some tie to the internet and most have something worth protecting there. Much can be said about Facebook accounts for their social value and the sentimental value of pictures hosted there, but there is far more to it. A recent article in The New York Times titled “Leaving Behind the Digital Keys to Financial Lives” picked up on this theme since we do most of our banking and investing online. If you go to the effort to document your legal wishes in an estate plan for the control and management for your estate, then they at least need to know the “what” and the “where” regarding the estate to control and manage. Unfortunately, digital accounts have few paper trails by their very nature and passwords may change every week. Simply put, you have to plan to hand over the keys to your digital estate and that often can take more diligence than planning for the keys of the family home. As helpfully summed up over in the original article: People needed to think about five things to ensure that everything goes smoothly with their digital financial lives if they become incapacitated or die: they need to maintain a list of their digital information; send the information to someone they trust; make sure other people know who has the information; leave instructions for how everything should be handled; and note all of this in an estate plan and update it regularly.

Reference: The New York Times (May 24, 2013) “Leaving Behind the Digital Keys to Financial Lives”

For more information, see www.jerryreiflawyer.com

 

Protect Your “Virtual” Property

Technology and cyberspace have definitely changed the way we conduct business and communicate with others. Have you considered how this will impact your Estate Plan? What happens to all of your emails, passwords and other “virtual” property when you are gone? Dealing with digital assets can be a tricky business, often in ways that aren’t readily apparent. Nevertheless, digital assets are both vital and newsworthy topics for estate planning. For example, consider an article by SmartMoney titled “Protecting You Virtual Estate” and the similar article by The Wall Street Journal titled “With Estate Planning, Don’t Forget Virtual Assets.” Both are worthy of your attention. Digital assets can range from personal data held in social websites to intellectual property, or even domain names. Then again and more importantly, a growing majority of people do their banking, investing, and tax-paying online. Is this starting to hit closer to home now? Few states have laws in place to account for the postmortem transfer of digital assets, so careful planning is important. Don’t forget to protect your “virtual” property just as you would your tangible assets. You wouldn’t want valuable information to be lost to your heirs.

Reference:

SmartMoney (July 25, 2012), “Protecting You Virtual Estate”

The Wall Street Journal (July 28, 2012) “With Estate Planning, Don’t Forget Virtual Assets.”