Digital Estate Planning: Passwords, Crypto, and Online Accounts After You’re Gone

A growing share of a real estate is digital — cryptocurrency, online brokerage and banking logins, domain names, photo libraries, even monetized social accounts — and a traditional will was never written with any of it in mind.

The Legal Access Problem

Most online platforms’ terms of service technically prohibit anyone but the account holder from logging in, which historically left executors with no legal way to access a deceased person’s accounts even with a valid will. The Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (RUFADAA) fixes this in most states — it’s been enacted in the large majority of states (all but a handful, including California and Massachusetts, which have their own variants), giving a named fiduciary a legal path to access digital accounts, generally deferring first to whatever access the platform’s own online tool allows (like Google’s Inactive Account Manager or Facebook’s Legacy Contact).

Cryptocurrency Is a Different, Harder Problem

RUFADAA solves legal access; it does nothing for cryptocurrency, which has no company or account-recovery process at all. A crypto wallet’s private key or seed phrase is the only way in — if it dies with you and no one else has it, the asset is permanently unrecoverable, not just tied up in probate. This makes secure key documentation (not stored in the will itself, which becomes a public record in probate) a genuinely different exercise than password planning for a regular account.

Building a Real Digital Asset Inventory

A workable digital estate plan is a private, updated inventory: financial accounts and crypto wallets, primary email (often the recovery method for everything else), domain names and any monetized content, and instructions for what should happen to each (close, transfer, archive) — paired with a password manager’s own emergency-access feature rather than a plain-text list, and referenced (not embedded) in your will or trust so your executor knows where to look.

Why This Needs Updating Regularly

Digital accounts change constantly — new platforms, closed accounts, new crypto holdings — in a way a traditional asset list doesn’t. A digital estate plan that’s more than a year or two old is often already missing accounts that matter.

Written by Samuel, Certified Public Accountant

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