Effective Digital Estate Management: Organizing and Securing Your Digital Life

Decades ago, a digital estate was something unheard-of. However, the world now lives and works online, which means a huge portion of your assets, and your legacy, are digital.

It's more important than ever to consider what that legacy entails and how you’d like it to be managed after you’re gone. That’s where digital estate planning comes in. Read on to find out what digital estate planning is, how to inventory and value your digital assets, and get strategies on protecting sensitive information and controlling access to your digital assets.

Key Takeaways

• A digital estate encompasses all your online accounts, digital assets, and electronic records.

• It's crucial to include an inventory of your digital assets and instructions in your will to ensure they are passed down to your loved ones, or disposed of, upon your death.

• The best way to manage your digital estate is to use a secure digital storage solution that enables you to update your assets and share access with relevant parties.

Identifying and Inventorying Your Digital Assets

Before you can start organizing your digital estate, you’ve got to take stock of the digital assets your estate contains.

What is a digital asset? Simply put, a digital asset is anything created or stored digitally that possesses some form of value. That value can be monetary, sentimental, or a combination of the two.

When it comes to different types of digital assets, you’re looking at a fairly wide range of things that combine to form your digital estate.

David Greiner, founder of David J. Greiner Law Corp. in Victorville, California, explains: “A digital estate encompasses all of your online accounts, digital assets, and electronic records. This includes things like email accounts, social media profiles, photos, videos, domains, websites.”

In addition to aspects of your daily ‌online presence, your estate may include intellectual property, digital currencies, or crypto assets. 

In terms of intellectual property, this could mean illustrations, manuscripts, animations, or anything in between. Meanwhile crypto assets refer to cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), or security tokens.

After identifying what counts as a digital asset in your life, the next step toward creating a digital inventory is to make a list of all of your digital assets. Make sure you include:

• The name of your digital asset.

• The type of asset.

• The location of your asset.

• Necessary login credentials to access each asset.

Once you develop a digital inventory of all your assets, you can organize and manage those assets in a way that makes sense to you.

Best Way to Manage and Organize Digital Assets 

According to Miles Brooks, a CPA and director of tax strategy at CoinLedger, the methods you need to deploy to manage your assets will depend on how you’ve chosen to categorize them. He explains:

“For example, for financial assets, it is important to have a centralized password manager and grant access to a person you trust in your estate plan. It is also wise to use two-factor authentication and have offline records in a secured location for important information.

"For personal assets, consider using cloud storage, and use a clear naming convention. Store your informational assets in a digital filing cabinet. Remember to scan the copies and share a folder with your family.”