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📖 7 min read
Passwords, social media, crypto, subscriptions — what happens to your digital life?
📋 Table of Contents
Think about how much of your life exists only online. Your email holds years of conversations, your cloud storage has irreplaceable family photos, and your streaming subscriptions keep charging your card month after month. Without a plan, your family is left guessing — or locked out entirely.
The average person has over 100 online accounts. That's 100 services that won't know you've passed away, 100 potential recurring charges, and 100 places where your personal data lives on indefinitely. Some of these accounts may have real financial value — think PayPal balances, cryptocurrency, or domain names.
Digital estate planning isn't just for tech-savvy people. If you have an email address and a smartphone, you have a digital estate worth planning for. The goal is simple: make sure the people you trust can access what they need, memorialize or close what they should, and aren't stuck paying for things you no longer use.
The first step is knowing what you have. Digital assets fall into several categories, and it's easy to forget accounts you set up years ago. Start by going through these categories:
Create a master list with the service name, your username or email, and what should happen to each account (transfer, memorialize, or delete). You don't need to store passwords in this list — we'll cover that separately.
Cryptocurrency is one of the most commonly lost assets after death. Unlike a bank account, there's no institution to call, no customer service to help, and no way to recover funds without the private keys. If your crypto dies with you, it's gone forever.
If you hold crypto in a self-custody wallet (hardware wallet like Ledger or Trezor, or a software wallet), your family needs your seed phrase — the 12 or 24 words that can recover your wallet. Without it, the funds are permanently inaccessible, regardless of their value.
If you use an exchange like Coinbase, Kraken, or Binance, the process is somewhat easier — your family can contact the exchange with a death certificate and go through their inheritance process. But they still need to know which exchanges you use.
The single best thing you can do for your digital estate is use a password manager — and make sure someone you trust can access it. Services like 1Password, Bitwarden, LastPass, and Dashlane store all your credentials in one encrypted vault.
Most password managers have an emergency access or trusted contact feature. 1Password lets you create an Emergency Kit with your master password and secret key. Bitwarden has an Emergency Access feature that grants a trusted contact access after a configurable waiting period.
If you don't use a password manager, at minimum document access to your most critical accounts: email (since password resets go there), financial accounts, and any accounts with sentimental value like photo storage.
A digital executor is someone you designate to manage your online accounts and digital assets after you pass away. This can be the same person as your traditional executor, but it doesn't have to be — you might want someone more tech-savvy handling your digital life.
Your digital executor should know where to find your digital asset inventory, how to access your password manager, and what your wishes are for each type of account. Do you want your Facebook memorialized or deleted? Should your blog stay online? What about your email archives?
Some states have adopted the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (RUFADAA), which gives executors legal authority to manage digital assets. But legal authority doesn't help if they can't actually log in. The practical access plan is just as important as the legal one.
Settled helps you inventory and plan for your digital assets alongside your traditional estate plan.
Social Media Accounts
Each major platform has its own policies for handling accounts after someone passes away. Knowing these policies in advance saves your family significant stress and confusion.
Facebook and Instagram (Meta): You can designate a "Legacy Contact" in your settings who can manage your memorialized profile — pinning posts, updating your profile photo, and responding to friend requests. Alternatively, you can request that your account be permanently deleted after death. Set this up now in Settings → Memorialization Settings.
Google (Gmail, YouTube, Drive): Google's Inactive Account Manager lets you decide what happens after a period of inactivity. You can choose to notify trusted contacts and share specific data with them, or have your account deleted entirely. Set it up at myaccount.google.com/inactive.
Apple: Apple's Digital Legacy program lets you designate Legacy Contacts who can request access to your iCloud data after your death. This includes photos, messages, notes, and more. Set this up in Settings → [Your Name] → Password & Security → Legacy Contact.