Life After Death: Secure Your Digital Legacy Before You Die
This recent piece in the Wall Street Journal notes the importance of reviewing your digital assets and the options that are available to owners to set up preferences before death. For example, some platforms now have legacy settings that can be created.
As mentioned in the piece, when the deceased’s credit cards were locked, resulting in automatic payments no longer being made, thousands of photos of family members and nature that were held in cloud-based storage became inaccessible. Additionally, password protection on a deceased’s devices can also make it impossible to access a variety of digital assets, which can include books and movies.
Now that there are some options to set preferences, having a plan that aims to minimize the hassle or outright inability to deal with some digital accounts is an important task to add to the estate planning to-do list.
The piece also recommends that families talk about what their preferences are regarding the maintenance or deletion of digital assets.