What Digital Assets Should Be Included in Your Estate Planning?
published 5/19/2016
While many individuals understand the basic elements of putting together an estate plan for their physical property, they may not understand the benefits of diving deeper and considering your digital assets. It's a good idea to start this process by making an inventory of all your digital assets.
Digital assets include everything from online banking accounts, utility accounts that you manage online, social media accounts and even hardware. It can be extremely beneficial to conduct a comprehensive inventory and come back to it over the course of several days as you remember the various items. Some of the digital assets you may own could include:
- Domain names
- Intellectual property like copyrighted materials
- Computing hardware like flash drives, computers, external hard drives, digital music players, tablets, digital cameras, smartphones, e-readers, and digital devices.
- Any data stored online, on a physical device or in the cloud
- Online accounts like communication and email, shopping, video and photo sharing, video gaming and websites or blogs that you might manage
It is also important to consider what you would like to happen to this digital information. For example, family photos may be something that you would like to pass down to an appointed beneficiary, whereas other accounts like social media, you may simply want closed down.
Consulting with an Ohio estate planning attorney can be very helpful in the process of doing your digital estate planning.