Digital estate planning: a simple guide for the US and Europe
How to plan your digital estate: list accounts, set platform legacy contacts, record your wishes, and understand what executors can access by law.
8 min readBy The Sealkept team
In this guide
Photos, email, crypto, subscriptions, the domain name you renewed for a project you never finished. Most of us now keep a large part of our lives online, and very little of it comes with instructions. Your digital life needs a plan just like your house and savings do, and it is usually the part families find hardest to untangle.
The good news is that a solid first version takes an evening. This guide covers what counts as your digital estate, five practical steps, what the law actually lets an executor see in the US, UK and Europe, and where to keep the plan so it can be found when it is needed. It is general information, not legal advice.
What counts as your digital estate
Anything you own or access online: email, cloud photos, social media, domain names, online banks, crypto, loyalty points, subscriptions, and the devices that unlock them.
It helps to sort it into a few groups, because each group needs a different kind of instruction:
- Keys: your phone, laptop, password manager and the email address everything resets to. If your family can get into these, they can usually reach the rest.
- Money: online-only banks, investment apps, PayPal, crypto wallets, airline miles and loyalty points that carry real value.
- Memories: cloud photo libraries, videos, voice notes, blogs, shared albums.
- Identity: social media profiles, a personal website, messaging accounts where friends will look for news.
- Obligations: subscriptions, cloud storage plans, software licences and anything else that keeps charging a card.
The keys matter most. A list of forty accounts is little use if no one can open the phone that receives the two-factor codes.
Five steps to a basic plan
You can do a solid first version in an evening. The digital legacy checklist walks you through the same steps and saves your progress as you go.
List your important accounts
Start with the keys and the money, then memories and identity. For each account, note the service, the email it uses, and roughly what is there. Leave passwords out of this list; it is a map, not a vault. If you want help deciding what goes where, our guide to telling family where important documents are covers the paper side too.
Turn on legacy settings where they exist, such as Google and Apple
Google's Inactive Account Manager, Apple's Legacy Contact and Facebook's legacy contact all let you decide in advance who gets access or what is deleted. Our accounts after death tool shows what each major service offers and where to find the setting.
Use a password manager with emergency access
Most good password managers let you name an emergency contact who can request access, with a waiting period you can refuse during. This is far safer than writing passwords on paper, and it updates itself when you change a password.
Write down your wishes: delete, memorialise, or pass on
For each important account, say what you want. Delete the shopping accounts. Memorialise the Facebook profile. Download the photo library and share it with your sister. Close the business email after clients have been told. Specific wishes save your family from guessing what you would have wanted.
Name who should handle it, and tell them
Usually this is your executor, though some people choose a separate, more tech-confident person for the digital side. Whoever it is, tell them they have the job and where the plan lives. Our guide on how to choose an executor covers how to ask.
What the law lets your executor see
In most US states, laws based on the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (RUFADAA) let executors access some digital accounts, especially where you have given permission. In Europe, approaches vary by country, and GDPR protects the living rather than the deceased. Either way, written instructions make your family's job far easier.
RUFADAA has been adopted in most US states. It sets out an order of priority for whose instructions win:
- The provider's online tool. If a service offers its own setting for this (Google's Inactive Account Manager, Facebook's legacy contact) and you used it, that choice wins, even over your will.
- Your will or estate plan. If you did not use an online tool, directions in your will, trust or power of attorney apply.
- The terms of service. If you left no instructions at all, the account is governed by the agreement you clicked through when you signed up.
The act also draws a line between content and catalogue. The catalogue is the record of your electronic communications: who you wrote to, who wrote to you, and when. The content is what the messages say. By default, an executor can usually ask for the catalogue and for other digital assets, but the content of your emails and messages is only disclosed if you consented to it, through a platform tool or in your will. If you want your executor to be able to read your email, say so in writing.
Providers can still ask for a death certificate, proof of the executor's authority, and sometimes a court order, so even a perfect plan involves some paperwork.
The UK has no equivalent of RUFADAA. Your executor's authority comes from the grant of probate (or confirmation in Scotland), but access to an online account is still largely decided by each provider's own policy and terms of service.
In practice that makes platform settings and written instructions doubly important. Set legacy contacts where they exist, use a password manager with emergency access, and leave a clear note of what you want to happen to each account. Mention digital assets in your will in general terms, but keep passwords out of it.
GDPR protects living people and leaves the treatment of deceased people's data to each country, so rules differ. France, for example, lets people leave directions about their personal data after death. In Germany, the Federal Court of Justice ruled in 2018 that a social media account can pass to heirs much like letters and diaries.
Elsewhere, the provider's terms usually decide. Wherever you live, the same advice holds: set the platform tools, record your wishes, and ask a local notary or lawyer how digital assets are treated in your country.
Platform tools fill the gaps, and where they stop
Platform legacy settings are worth turning on today. They are free, they take a few minutes, and under RUFADAA they carry the most legal weight.
- Google Inactive Account Manager notifies up to ten people after a period of inactivity you choose, and can share selected Google data with them or delete the account.
- Apple Legacy Contact gives the people you name an access key that, together with a death certificate, lets them request your iCloud data. Passwords in your keychain and purchased media are not included.
- Facebook legacy contact can look after a memorialised profile, but cannot read your messages.
What none of them do is reach beyond their own walls. Google Inactive Account Manager only shares Google data. Apple only covers Apple. None of them will deliver a personal letter to your daughter, or a note to your executor explaining which bank holds the mortgage. For personal letters you need something built for that, such as a dead man's switch for messages, which keeps letters sealed until you stop checking in.
Where to keep the plan
Somewhere private now and findable later. That rules out a few obvious places: a will may become public, a note on your phone is locked when your phone is, and a drawer is found by whoever clears the house first.
Good options include a sealed envelope held by your solicitor or executor, a password manager's emergency access feature, or a sealed note in Sealkept, released only if you stop checking in and your chosen verifiers and grace period have run their course. Notes are encrypted at rest and delivered only by your rules; our trust page explains exactly how that works. If you would like a home for both the practical plan and the letters that go with it, Sealkept is built for exactly that.
Whatever you choose, tell your executor where it is. And when the time comes for someone you love, the when someone dies checklist covers the first thirty days from the other side.
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