Digital estate planning, done properly
Digital estate planning is the work of deciding, while you are alive and able, who can reach the digital assets you leave behind, under what authority, and to what end. It covers everything you own or control that lives online or on a device: financial accounts, cryptocurrency, photo libraries, email, social profiles, domains, intellectual property, and the accumulated record of who you are. A digital estate plan documents what exists, who is allowed to act on it, and how that authority is proven after your death.
Most people already have a will for their house and their bank account. Far fewer have anything for the parts of their life that are now almost entirely digital, and those parts are easily the most fragile, because they sit behind passwords and platform terms rather than physical custody. This page sets out what counts as a digital asset, the four steps to a plan that actually works, the tools people reach for and where each one stops, and the single gap they all share: they plan for access, not for identity.
What counts as a digital asset
A digital asset is anything of value, financial or personal, that exists in digital form or is controlled through a digital account. The category is broader than most people expect, and it falls into a few distinct groups, each with its own rules at death.
Financial accounts and money: online banking, brokerage and superannuation logins, PayPal and Stripe balances, loyalty points, and anything with a custodian who can be presented with a death certificate.
Cryptocurrency: the hardest case, because self-custodied coins have no custodian and no recovery. We cover this in full in our guide to what happens to your crypto when you die, and it is the clearest example of why access planning matters.
Photos, files and correspondence: the iCloud, Google Photos and email archives that hold most of a family's memory, alongside documents and creative work in progress.
Intellectual property and online income: domains, manuscripts, code, channels, and any account that earns money or licenses your work.
Your identity itself: social profiles, your voice, your writing, the record of how you thought and what you believed. This is a digital asset too, and it is the one no platform recovery process was ever designed to protect.
The first four groups are recoverable with the right paperwork and the right people. The last is different in kind, and we return to it at the end, because it is the reason a plan built only on access is incomplete.
The four steps of a digital estate plan
A digital estate plan that holds up has four parts. Skip any one and the plan tends to fail at exactly the moment it is needed.
First, an inventory. A private, current record of what you hold and where: which accounts, which platforms, which devices, which wallets. Your family cannot recover, close, or memorialise what they do not know exists, and a surprising amount is lost simply because no one knew to look for it. The full set of accounts to account for is laid out in our overview of what happens to your digital accounts after death.
Second, an access plan. For each asset, a decision about how the right person reaches it, without writing secrets anywhere they could be exposed. This is the part people get wrong, usually by putting passwords somewhere convenient and insecure, or somewhere secure that nobody will ever find.
Third, legal authority. The person acting on your estate needs the standing to do so. In the United States this is shaped by RUFADAA, the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, which most states have adopted to let a named fiduciary access digital assets where you have granted permission. The rules differ by country, which is why an Australian digital estate follows a different path from a digital will in the USA. What does not differ is the principle: authority has to be granted in advance, by you, to a named person.
Fourth, the person. Every step above resolves to a human being who will actually do the work: a digital executor who knows the inventory exists, can reach the access plan, and holds the legal standing to act. Tools do not execute an estate. People do, under authority you gave them while you could.
The tools people use, and where they stop
There is no shortage of tools that touch part of this problem. Each solves something real, and each stops short of a complete plan.
Password managers hold credentials securely and many now offer an emergency-access feature that releases the vault to a nominated contact after a waiting period. This is genuinely useful, and we cover it in detail in our guide to using a password manager after death. But a vault is a pile of keys, not a plan. It says nothing about who is allowed to use which key, in what order, or for what purpose, and it does nothing for self-custodied crypto or for assets that never had a password in the first place.
Platform legacy tools, such as Apple's Legacy Contact, Google's Inactive Account Manager and Facebook's legacy settings, let you nominate someone per platform. They are worth setting up, but they are fragmented by design: each covers one company's silo, none of them talk to each other, and none of them constitute legal authority over your estate as a whole.
Wills handle the legal and financial estate and can and should name a digital executor. But a will is the wrong place for secrets, because it frequently becomes a public document at probate, and it is a static instrument that cannot govern access in real time. The correct, careful pattern for using one is set out in our guide to including digital assets in a will.
Every tool here manages a fragment. None of them governs the whole.
The gap they all leave
Stack these tools together and you get a better outcome than most people have. You also get a pile of credentials, a scatter of per-platform nominations, and a will that points at some of it. What you do not get is governance: a single authority that decides who gains access, to what, and at what moment, with a record of every action taken.
This is the gap Executor Lock™ is built to close. Instead of leaving secrets lying around in the hope the right person finds them at the right time, it puts a governing authority over the whole estate. It works on a three-tier model: a Recipient receives what you leave; a Trusted Contact holds an account and access rights that activate at your death; and an Executor can report your passing and trigger the Lock. The executor has the final word, the Lock is irreversible once engaged, and every action is written to a permanent, append-only audit trail. Access is granted deliberately, by the right person, at the right moment, and never before.
Governance is what turns a collection of tools into a plan you can trust. It is also what makes the next part possible, because the most valuable thing in your digital estate is not an account at all.
Access is not identity
Every step so far has been about access: making sure nothing is lost, that the right people can reach the right things, and that someone has the authority to act. That work matters, and most people never do it. But it has a limit, and the limit is the whole reason this company exists.
Handing your family your passwords gives them your accounts. It does not give them you. The way you thought, the things you believed, the voice you spoke in, the answers you would have given to questions your children have not asked yet, are not in any vault. That is the work of building a Persona while you are alive: a governed, consent-first representation of who you are, across the many dimensions that make up a person, locked and protected so it cannot be altered, retrained, or commercialised after your death.
So do both. Inventory your assets, build an access plan, grant legal authority, and name the person who will act, all under a single governing authority rather than a drawer full of secrets. Then, separately and deliberately, preserve the person behind the assets. The accounts are recoverable with a plan. The person is only preserved if you choose to. Build Once. Live Twice.™