Digital Assets — What Happens to Your Online Life When You Die?

You have a will that covers your house, your car, your bank accounts. But what about your email? Your Facebook? Your cryptocurrency?
Most estate plans don’t mention digital assets. And that’s a growing problem, because for many people, some of their most valuable, or most important, property exists only online.
Missouri adopted the Missouri Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (MFADAA) in 2018. It’s codified in RSMo §§ 472.400 through 472.490. The law gives your executor or trustee the legal authority to access your digital assets, but only if your estate plan grants that authority. Without it, tech companies will default to their own terms of service, which almost always favor locking the account permanently.
Let’s start with the practical stuff. If you have two-factor authentication on your email, and you should, your executor needs access to your phone or authentication app to get in. If they can’t get into your email, they probably can’t reset passwords on anything else. One locked account cascades into a dozen.
Cryptocurrency is the most extreme example. Bitcoin, Ethereum, whatever you hold, if nobody has your private keys or seed phrase, that money is gone. Not locked. Not recoverable. Gone. There is no bank to call. There is no customer service number.
But you don’t need crypto for this to matter. Think about what’s in your email right now: financial statements, tax documents, insurance policies, correspondence with your attorney. Your executor needs that information to settle your estate. If it’s locked behind a password nobody knows, they’re flying blind.
Facebook lets you designate a “legacy contact” who can manage your memorialized account. Google has an “Inactive Account Manager” that can share data or delete your account after a period of inactivity. Apple has a “Digital Legacy” program. Most people have never set any of these up.
Here’s what a solid digital asset plan includes: a current list of your online accounts and how to access them, stored securely in a password manager your executor can access or in a sealed document with your estate planning papers. Your will or trust should explicitly grant your fiduciary the authority to access, manage, and distribute digital assets. And your powers of attorney should cover digital assets during your lifetime, not just after death.
This is the part of estate planning that didn’t exist 20 years ago. But if you do any part of your financial life online — and you do — it needs to be part of the plan.

Patrick Nolan is a Missouri estate planning attorney based in Kirksville. He is the author of Dead Man’s Guide to Estate Planning and can be found online at nemolegal.com. Questions for Ask The Lawyer may be submitted to ask@nemolegal.com.