Digital Estate Planning: How to Prepare Your Social Media Accounts
When planning your estate, leave instructions for handling your online accounts, data and other electronic affairs.How do you want your social media pages, smartphone photos and computer files handled after you die? While property and money distribution are usually at the top of the estate-planning list, don’t forget to leave instructions regarding your digital accounts and assets — so your survivors are left with more than just random bits and pixels from your online presence.Here’s a short guide to getting your digital material in order, as well as advice for dealing with the accounts of those who departed without leaving directions.Create a Digital DirectiveA law known as the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, enacted by most states, gives a chosen representative (like your estate’s executor) the authority to manage your electronic affairs. For specific instructions, create a document stipulating how you want your online accounts and all digital content handled when you die or become incapacitated, and keep it with your other estate papers.Giving access to your account user names and passwords will greatly help your representative, but proceed carefully. You will need a safe place to list the credentials for all your financial institutions, as well as for any e-commerce stores, insurance policies, online storage, email, social media platforms, cable and wireless carriers, medical apps, and media subscriptions.The 1Password app can hold all kinds of confidential information.1PasswordOne way to encrypt and store this sensitive information is to enter it all into a password-manager app. Wirecutter, the product review site owned by The New York Times, recommends 1Password ($3 a month for an individual plan, $5 a month for the shared family plan) or Bitwarden (free, with in-app upgrades). Apple and Google have their own free apps, which save and store passwords on devices running their software.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
