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Preparing for your digital life after death

If you are thinking about drawing up a will, don’t forget to give due consideration to what will happen to your online presence after your death.

As modern life moves our personal assets from real life to the online realm, this shift needs to be factored in to estate planning.

Assets which once were real and tangible, such as photo albums and vinyl LPs, are now increasingly moving to the virtual world, in a digital file format.

Our books, films and music now reside in the cloud, through the servers of Netflix and Spotify, and not on our shelves. And in many ways our personal reputations also live online. Our social lives are conducted through WhatsApp, Snapchat and various other social media accounts.

Value

Digital assets may also have financial value, such as an iTunes music collection, downloaded e-reader books, X-Box games, Adobe Suite Creative Cloud licenses and paid-for apps on a smartphone. Or perhaps the deceased made a canny investment in the shape of a valuable domain name. Or the departed has a pile of winnings stashed in an online betting account.

This digital footprint is also part of your legacy and issuing precise instructions on what is to happen to online accounts will make life easier for family members in the event of your demise.

Those with a social media presence should also think very hard about what they want done with these accounts once they have departed this life.

Facebook, for instance, offers the choice of either deleting or “memorialising” a deceased person’s account, as a forum for friends and family to gather and share memories after a person has passed away.

Memorialising means the word ‘Remembering’ will be shown next to the person’s name on their profile.

And if a ‘legacy contact’ has been named, that person will have the option to do things like sharing a final message or posting information about funeral arrangements.

Make life easier for the executor of your will.

To simplify matters, draw up a list of every online account in your name, together with passwords.

This should include email addresses, bank accounts and online utility accounts as well as social networking sites.

A clear map of your digital footprint will save family members serious headaches in the long run.

Failing to grapple with this issue may mean that material which is of great sentimental value but hosted on social networks, cannot be recovered.

Digital assets

Other digital assets might include creative works such as music or creative writing or video files.

Bear in mind that what once was kept on bits of paper now often lives only in the digital sphere.

Spell out very clearly to your next of kin what you want done with your social media accounts. Should your death be announced on that Twitter account with 12,000 followers? Or should your online presence in 140-character land be deactivated immediately on your demise?

These are issues that require some thought and a certain amount of forward planning. A little notebook, or personal assets logbook, which holds your account details and passwords, is the first step.

Logbook

It’s essential to keep your personal digital assets logbook up to date. Record all digital assets with a list of usernames and passwords.

Keep this in a safe place and inform your next of kin about it.The key is to make your online life easily accessible to the executors of your will, in order that they can carry out your wishes.