When a colleague of mine passed away unexpectedly last year, her family discovered she had a cryptocurrency account with nearly $80,000 in it. They knew it existed because she’d mentioned it once, casually, at a family dinner.
What they didn’t know: the exchange she used. The email address she’d registered with. The password. The two-factor authentication linked to her old phone, which no one had the passcode for. Whether there was a hardware wallet somewhere, or just the exchange account.
That $80,000 is still locked. It may be forever.
This is the digital estate problem — and it’s not just about crypto. It’s every bank account, investment account, and financial platform that’s only accessible online. It’s the email account that’s also your recovery address for everything else. It’s the cloud storage with years of photos. It’s the subscriptions your family will keep paying long after you’re gone because they don’t know to cancel them.
What Counts as a Digital Asset
When most people think “digital assets,” they think passwords. But your digital estate is broader than that:
- Financial accounts with online access — banking, brokerage, retirement accounts
- Cryptocurrency and digital currencies — Bitcoin, Ethereum, stablecoins, NFTs
- Business accounts — if you own a business, this includes your business banking, merchant accounts, and any platform revenue
- Email accounts — especially your primary email, which is often the recovery address for everything else
- Cloud storage — Google Drive, iCloud, Dropbox — often contains documents, photos, and irreplaceable memories
- Social media accounts — some families want them memorialized; others want them deleted
- Subscriptions — streaming services, software, recurring charges that continue until someone cancels them
- Loyalty points and rewards — airline miles and hotel points can have real value and are often transferable
The average person has over 100 online accounts. Most estates have no plan for any of them.
The Password Manager Problem
“But I use a password manager,” I hear a lot. That’s great — but a password manager is only useful if someone can get into it. If your family doesn’t know your master password, your password manager is a locked vault they can’t access, sitting right in front of them.
The solution isn’t to abandon good password hygiene. It’s to create a secure, structured record that a trusted person can access when they need to — without exposing you to security risk while you’re alive.
The Legal Side of Digital Assets
Here’s something most people don’t know: your ability to grant someone access to your digital accounts after death is governed by a patchwork of federal law, platform terms of service, and state law — none of which necessarily work in your family’s favor.
The federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act means that accessing someone’s account without authorization, even after they die, can technically be a crime. Most platforms don’t have straightforward processes for transferring or even accessing deceased users’ accounts. And your will likely doesn’t address digital assets at all.
This is why documentation matters — and why the documentation needs to be done correctly, with an eye toward what will actually hold up when your family needs it.
What the Digital Asset and Password Organizer Includes
The Digital Asset and Password Organizer is a structured, comprehensive system for capturing and organizing everything your family would need to access your digital life. It covers financial accounts, cryptocurrency, email, social media, business accounts, subscriptions, cloud storage, loyalty programs, and more — with guided prompts so you don’t miss anything important.
It also includes instructions for storing the document securely (not in cloud storage that requires a password to access) and guidance on how to reference it in your legal documents so your executor has authority to act on it.
This is the organizational tool your estate plan is missing.
Don’t let your digital life become a locked vault for the people you love.
Get the Digital Asset and Password Organizer — $19 →
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The information in this post is for educational purposes only and does not constitute legal, tax, or financial advice. Please consult a qualified estate planning attorney for guidance specific to your situation.