Informative Masterclass
How to Protect your Family’s Assets and Leave a Lasting Legacy
Save Your Spot Now!

White Plains & New City, New York Estate Planning & Elder Law Firm

How Digital Assets Figure into Estate Planning

May 12, 2021
David Parker, Esq.
What Happened to Phil Spector
David Parker, White Plains and New City NY Estate Planning Attorney
David Parker, Esq.
David Parker is an attorney who specializes in Estate Planning and Elder Law and has been practicing law for 30 years. Be it Wills, Trusts, Powers of Attorney, Health Care Proxies, or Medicaid Planning, David provides comprehensive and caring counsel for seniors and their families. A large portion of David’s practice is asset protection strategies so that families do not lose their hard earned savings to nursing home care costs. He also handles probate administration for the settlement of estates.
Estate planning isn't just about hard assets anymore. Who will read your email when you die?

Digital Assets - Yahoo Finance’s recent article entitled “Who inherits your selfies when you die?” laments that the internet ruins everything, and a simple death is no exception.

If asked to close out a family member’s estate, it now includes social media accounts, cloud storage and frequent flyer miles.

Digital assets are files created electronically. They exist as data held on a digital storage drive or computer hard drive.

However, items made by hand can become a digital asset, such as a painting or handwritten notes become digital assets, if they’re scanned and uploaded to a computer.

It can also be images, photos, videos, files containing text, spreadsheets, or slide decks.

The first time anyone has to deal with the laws and rules about incapacity and death, is when a loved one becomes ill or has passed away. It’s an emotionally tough time, and they’re likely to be grieving when trying to make important decisions on a project they know nothing about.

Know that we no longer solely have a paper trail to our lives. Think about the number of digital accounts you log into to manage your household and personal finances.

It’s significant, and an executor's role is now dependent on knowing and finding both our physical and digital lives.

Your executor won’t know what you have, unless you tell them in advance.

Your home office is paperless and behind a locked screen. We all have wishes and preferences about those assets, and these wishes and preferences need to be documented and shared.

Today’s home office is a digital home office. We will soon have the same spectrum of choices in estate planning for our digital assets, as we have for our physical ones.

However, right now, there aren’t a lot of pre-planning options.

You should create a list of your digital assets and passwords, so others you trust will know where to find them. Back up data should be stored in the cloud to a local computer or storage device.

Ask an experienced estate planning attorney about how to organize and address your digital assets in your estate plan.

Reference: Yahoo Finance (April 16, 2021) “Who inherits your selfies when you die?”

 

Share This Post
Stay Informed
Subscribe To Our FREE Estate Planning, Probate and Elder Law Newsletter

Book Your Free Initial Consultation With Parker Law Firm Today
Get Started Now

The 15 minute initial phone call is designed as a simple way for you to get to know us, and for our team to learn more about your unique estate planning needs.

Book an Initial Call
Book A Call With Parker Law Firm
Parker Law Firm
White Plains Location

222 Bloomingdale Rd #301,
White Plains, NY 10605

New City Location

120 North Main Street, Suite 203,
New City, NY 10956

IMS - Estate Planning and Elder Law Practice Growth Advisors
Powered by
crosscross-circle