Be Sure to Leave Behind Access Information for Your Online Accounts
In today’s digitally driven society, we must consider more than just our physical assets when crafting our estate plans. It’s not enough to plan out what you want to have happen to our online accounts after we pass — we also must provide our estate administrators with access information to all our accounts to ensure they are able to carry out our wishes.
However, this information should not be part of your last will and testament. The contents of a will become available to the public after your death, so any usernames or passwords you include in that document would also be public knowledge.
You do not need an official estate planning document to provide this information to your administrator. Instead, the best strategy is to create a simple list or spreadsheet, and attach the most updated version to the rest of your estate planning documents.
This list should include information about how to access any of the following:
- Password-protected computers or devices
- Web hosting services
- Email accounts
- Blogs
- Social media sites
- Photo storage sites
- Online subscriptions (newspapers, websites, magazines)
- Financial sites
- Utilities or other companies with automatic bill payments
- Retirement or savings accounts
- Software applications
Keep in mind that certain websites and services could have their own rules about what happens to an account after a user passes away. Your estate administrator may need to get in touch with these websites to get your account canceled or deleted.
For more tips on how to organize your access information and other important documents related to your estate plan, contact an experienced Florida estate planning lawyer at BaumannKangas Estate Law.