Digital Assets

How to make sure your digital property ends up in the right hands.

1. Make A List Of All Your Digital Assets And How To Access Each One

What digital assets do you own? Make a list of your digital assets, including everything from hardware to social media accounts to online banking accounts to home utilities that you manage online. In brief, your digital assets may include:

• Computing hardware, such as computers, external hard drives or flash drives, tablets, smartphones, digital music players, e-readers, digital cameras, and other digital devices
• Any information or data that is stored electronically, whether online, in the cloud, or on a physical device
• Any online accounts, such as email and communications accounts, social media accounts, shopping accounts, photo and video sharing accounts, video gaming accounts, online storage accounts, and websites and blogs that you may manage
• Domain names
• Intellectual property, including copyrighted materials, trademarks, and any code you may have written and own

How can your Digital Executor access these assets? Sharing your logins and passwords is essential to the continuity and responsible management of your digital estate. If you use a password manager program, you can simply share your access information with that account. 

If not, it’s important that you record the login and password information for key accounts. If you have computing hardware, such as computers, external hard drives or flash drives, tablets, smartphones, digital music players, e-readers, digital cameras, etc., you’ll want to record where those items are located, as well as any passwords that are required to access those devices.

2. Decide What You Want Done With These Assets

How should each asset be handled? Depending on the nature of the property, the way you want different types of digital property managed may vary. While you may want some assets to be archived and saved, you may want others to be deleted or erased, while others should be transferred to family members, friends, or business colleagues. For each digital account or asset that you have, specify how you’d like your Digital Executor to handle that asset. While your wishes may conflict with some companies’ terms of service, it’s still valuable to your Executor to know what your wishes are.

Do any of the assets have monetary value? If so, you may want to instruct your Executor to handle those assets in a specific way. For example, should revenue-generating assets be transferred to people who will continue to manage the accounts? Should credits or points or cash values be redeemed? Should online stores you manage be immediately shut down, shut down after all items are sold, or transferred to someone who can continue to manage the store? If assets will continue to generate revenue, it’s worth thinking about where that money is going, and who will be able to access it after you’re gone.

3. Name A Digital Executor

Who do you trust to carry out your wishes for your digital assets? Basically, your Digital Executor is someone you designate to help settle your digital estate, however you specified in the document you created in steps 1 and 2 of this plan. In most states, a Digital Executor is not a legally binding or enforceable designation. Even so, you can still name a Digital Executor, as this person can be designated by your Executor to follow the wishes laid out in your digital estate plan, or can at least help your Executor with the digital aspects of your estate.

4. Store This Information In A Secure-But-Accessible Location

There are three main ways you can securely store this kind of sensitive information.

With an attorney.

With an online storage service like Everplans.

In a locked file cabinet or safe.

No matter how you decide to store your digital estate plan, you’ll want to be sure that the people who need to know where the plan is actually known. It’s generally a good idea to tell one or two people who you trust—your spouse, your adult children, or your Digital Executor, for example—where the plan is located and how to access it. This means giving the person you trust the name of your attorney, the name of the online storage company you’ve used, or the location of keys or the combination to your safe. This way, when the time comes, the people who need to access the plan you’ve made can find the plan and access it.

5. If Possible, Make It Legal

Depending on where you live, you may be able to formalize your digital estate plan as a legally binding document, such as your Will or a codicil to a Will. The easiest way to do this is to name a Digital Executor in your Will (or specify who your traditional Executor should work with to settle your digital estate). Then you should specify the location of your digital asset inventory so that when the time comes your Digital Executor can find and access your plan.

Do not include your passwords other digital asset access information in your Will. When you die, your Will becomes a public document, which means that anyone can read it—including any sensitive information it may contain. A good solution to this is to refer in your Will to an outside document that contains all the necessary information needed to settle your digital estate. This way, you can continue to add to, revise, and update the document without having to formally change your Will or put your digital assets at risk.

The Four Most Popular Password Managers

Tired of using a notepad and Post-It notes to keep track of all your login information and passwords? Your digital salvation is here!

As our lives become more digitally focused, passwords have grown out of control. In the past, many of us only had a handful of passwords. Now between email, social media, online banking, health insurance, entertainment, and more, it’s not uncommon to have more than a hundred of these things floating around.

Plus, it’s not just the passwords. Do you log in with an email or a username? What are the answers to your secret questions? If you used a proper name, did you capitalize it? When a vicious hack or virus hits the Internet, how can you quickly and easily change your passwords?

The good news is there’s a digital solution for all of these problems. They’re called password managers or password wallets and they securely keep track of all this sensitive information, often only requiring you to remember one master password to access all your accounts. All you have to do is install a simple browser plugin or download an app to your phone, and you’re ready to go. As avid users of password managers, we surveyed the Everplans team and narrowed it down to four providers: 1Password, Dashlane, KeePassX, and LastPass, listed below in alphabetical order.

1Password

How it Works: Once you’ve installed the app and browser plugins, which work on every major platform, it saves usernames and passwords as you log into various websites. For new sign-ups, it has a password generator that allows you to create complex, unique passwords for every site you access. Your password vault is encrypted by a master password, so the company that built 1Password (AgileBits) never has access to your stash of passwords.

Ease of Use: It’s very simple to use once you make it part of your routine. It will only populate the username and password once you’ve unlocked the app and clicked the saved entry for that site. It remembers logins for a site even if the URL is not an exact match for the URL you have saved (for example, if all you have saved for the URL is “everplans.com” but the login page is “my.everplans.com/users/sign_in”, it will still recognize the site.)

Tips/Tricks: The app can store and fill in credit cards and other types of personal info into forms for you. You can also create separate “vaults,” so it’s possible to set up a private vault for your-eyes-only and separate vault filled shared passwords for a family or co-workers.

Cost: The Mac and Windows version cost $2.99 a month for individuals and $4.99 per month for families (billed annually) and includes unlimited installations across all computers and devices.

Site: 1Password.com

Dashlane

How It Works: This is a computer and mobile app that allows you to save everything, from passwords to credit card info to receipts, in a digital wallet that is accessed by one master password.

Ease of Use: You can automatically sign in to online sites using the passwords it has stored, as well as easily generate new strong passwords for websites, which are then auto-saved in your digital wallet.

Tips/Tricks: If you lose your password, your entire account gets wiped. So you need to be careful!

Cost: Dashlane Premium is $4.99 per month (billed annually) and provides automatic syncs across all your devices, automatic backups of your account, and more. A Premium Plus version for $9.99 (billed annually) includes credit monitoring and identity theft insurance.

Site: Dashlane.com

KeePassX

How it Works: This is kind of old school in that it doesn’t use a cloud. You install an app on your Windows or Mac computer(s) and phone(s), which uses an encrypted file stored on your computer that houses all your passwords. If you put that file in your Dropbox, it becomes available across all your computers and phones. Because the password data is stored on your computer and NOT in the cloud, it’s unlikely to be a target of a coordinated break-in.

Ease of Use: It takes some tech-savviness to set it up–their site can be considered intimidating–but once you’re up and running it’s very easy to use (one of our founders’ mom uses it). Also, it doesn’t auto-fill forms for you, which could be considered a benefit since some see these as a security risk.

Tips/Tricks: Remember to go to preferences and adjust the “auto logout” and “auto-save” parameters. Also, remember not to leave the password window open after you look up a password–depending on how you leave it open, the program will not be able to auto-log out.

Cost: The desktop app is free. There are a few iPhone Apps you can use with it, one of which is PassDrop ($1.99).

Site: KeepassX.org

LastPass

How it Works: LastPass saves all your passwords in their cloud servers and allows you to access them with a single master password.

Ease of Use: Install a plugin on your web browser and it will pre-fill usernames and passwords. It can store unlimited passwords and username combinations for each site, generate secure passwords on the fly, detect newly created or changed passwords (and then asks to save them to your vault), and store credit card info.

Tips/Tricks: You can search your vault from the web plugin. Use the right-click menu to copy and paste passwords from matching sites or to auto-fill forms. It also supports multiple user profiles.

Cost: The desktop version and mobile app are free. The Premium version for 1 user ($36/year) offers 1GB of encrypted file storage and allows you to securely share passwords with others; the Families plan ($48/year) allows for 6 different users.

Site: LastPass.com