How to prepare a digital will. Managing a person's digital legacy after their death is an additional nightmare, says Merryn Somerset Webb. Your digital fingerprint is the record of all your online interactions. Once something is posted or shared online, it can be there forever. Understanding your digital footprint helps you choose and control what you leave online for others to find.
While many people are familiar with traditional estate planning, creating a will, and creating a durable power of attorney, it's also important to think about digital estate planning. How will your loved ones access your online accounts to pay the bills? What should they do with records, memories, and other assets that are on their electronic devices or in cloud storage? If you decide to use 1Password, you'll invite family members to your shared account. Once they're joined, you can add or move account logins, secure notes, banking information, and even your computer files to the shared vault. They can access this information with the only password they configured for their own account.
And if they forget their password, you or someone else you designate at 1Password can help them recover it. Google's inactive account manager will notify up to 10 people if you've been inactive for a certain period of time (3, 6, 12 or 18 months). You can choose to share data such as your calendar, Google Drive files, Google Photos, and email. You can also decide to delete your Google account three months after it becomes inactive. To set it up, go to the inactive account manager page and follow the instructions.
The accumulation of everything related to you that is in digital format is part of your digital legacy. For more information on fingerprints, read the Scan magazine article: Expert Perspectives on Education for Positive Fingerprint Development. Your digital legacy can contain messages for specific people you love and care about, it can be a chronology of your life, such as all the important events you went through in your life, or a portfolio of the content you created throughout your life. For more information on leaving digital assets in your will, contact us at Just Wills and Legal Services at 01342 477102 to schedule a free consultation.
Creating a positive digital footprint is an important part of protecting your reputation, both now and in the future. Perform a thorough review of your digital assets and keep track of the logins, usernames and passwords that your executors may need to access online accounts. For some ideas on how to do this, watch Katelin McClure's video on how to create a positive digital footprint. Your digital legacy will contain everything that you consider significant to you and important to you.
For practical tips on how to clean a fingerprint, read the ABC News article How to Protect Your Children from Your Digital Footprint. O Money deposited in online accounts, such as PayPal, trust, online games, digital currency accounts, or money left in online shopping accounts such as Amazon. If you want your family members to be able to manage their accounts and access your digital property, whether it has a monetary or purely sentimental value, ask an attorney to add this clause to your will or trust, Orzeske advises. But this digital list isn't something you can do without forgetting that our digital legacies are constantly changing, so you'll have to update it every year.
Digital assets are becoming a larger and much more important percentage of people's personal wealth.
