Digital Decluttering Episode 4: Digital Estate Planning

PHOTO CREDIT: @KELLYSIKKEMA

Can our loved access all of our treasured memories?
Can our executors easily access our key on-line accounts to gain critical information?

With our lives becoming more and more online, and it is all well and good having everything paperless but can your other half access everything they need to. Just as important as a Will it planning our digital estate, which is all to often forgotten, but essential in this digital age. Here are some simple steps to start you thinking:

1. Find your digital assets and passwords 
Before we can decide what happens to our digital bubble after we pass on we need to find all everything that we want to have control over and how to access each of them. Unfortunately, the list will be longer than you would expect but well worth it. As a starter here are some possible areas

• Banking: accounts, credit cards, store cards, savings and PayPal

• Investments: Cryptocurrency, ICO Tokens & blockchain investments

• Loyalty points: store cards, travel loyalty schemes, website loyalty memberships

• Entertainment: music and film purchases, e-books, image purchases, digital box sets

• Online ownership: websites and blogs you run, domain names you own, social media accounts

• Digital devices: computers, phones, tablets, e-readers, music players etc.

2. Make a choice
Just like a Will, you need to make a decision as to what will happen to each of these areas in simple terms:

• Share

• Memoralise

• Delete

This can be a difficult to choice to make but just as much as you would give a treasured book to your favourite Nephew it is lovely to think that your family can enjoy your photo memories once you have moved on.

Social media is still a difficult area and has often been in the news as a result, when families want access to their loved one's accounts. So the media companies have developed a number of options to memoralise accounts or give loved-ones access to accounts after a passing, but these are not a simple as just having the access password. The current options include:

• Facebook: appoint a legacy contact to look after your memorialised account

• Google (YouTube / Gmail): set up an inactive account manager

• Instagram: memorialise on death

• LinkedIn: remove profile

• Twitter: report and account is deactivated

3. Store access information
The most important part is to make sure someone knows how to access all these digital memories while keeping them safe. You could:

• Keep it with your will

• Keep it in the fireproof box with all your important documents

However with passwords ever-changing as you try to keep your information as safe as possible the increasingly popular option is to use an online password storage such as 1Password, Dashlane, LastPass to allow access with just one password

It is always hard to think about planning after we have gone, but our planning now can help our family and friends manage at a very difficult time and treasure the memories we have so carefully kept.

....This is the last in the series of our Digital Decluttering, I hope you have found it useful and thought-provoking and remember the key is to make good choices now and in the future.