The estate plan is done and it is a good one. The house is handled, the retirement accounts have beneficiaries, the truck goes to the son, and there is a paragraph about the coin collection in the safe. Everybody signs, the attorney puts the originals in an envelope, and the family feels a real sense of relief driving home.
Nobody mentioned the forty thousand photographs sitting in a cloud account. Nobody mentioned the domain name the business email runs on, which renews automatically on a card that will be closed. Nobody mentioned the hardware wallet in the back of that same safe, or the fact that the twelve words written on a card next to it are the only thing standing between the family and the money on it. These are real assets with real value, and they are the ones estate plans still routinely miss. Here is what tends to fall through and how to close the gaps. As always, this is general information rather than legal advice, and the right person to draft any of this is your own estate attorney.
Do Not Put Passwords in the Will
This is the most common well intentioned mistake, and the reason it is a mistake is simple. A will filed for probate becomes a public court record. Anything written inside it, including a list of accounts and passwords, can be read by anyone who walks into the courthouse or pulls the file online.
There is a second problem that is more practical. Passwords change. A will does not, or at least not without a lawyer and a signing ceremony. A document that lists credentials is stale within months and misleading within a year, which is worse than no list at all because it sends people down dead ends. What belongs in the estate plan is authority. What belongs somewhere else entirely is access.
The Inventory Is the Actual Work
The single most useful document a family can leave behind is not legal at all. It is a plain list of what exists and where it lives, written in a way that does not compromise anything if somebody reads it.
- Describe locations, not credentials. “The photos are in an iCloud account under this email address.” “The business domain is registered at this registrar.” “There is a brokerage account at this firm.” That kind of list is safe to leave in a filing cabinet and enormously valuable to whoever is settling the estate.
- Use a password manager with an emergency access feature. A password manager is an encrypted vault that stores your logins behind one master password. Several offer a designated emergency contact. Bitwarden’s version, for example, lets a trusted person request access, notifies you by email, and grants either view access or full takeover after a waiting period that you set in advance. That waiting period is the safety valve. This is where credentials belong, not in a will.
- Name the people, and tell them. An emergency contact who does not know they are one is not a plan. Neither is a sealed envelope nobody can find. Say it out loud to at least two people.
- Date the list and revisit it once a year. Put it on the same schedule as changing the smoke detector batteries. Accounts open and close constantly and a five year old inventory is barely better than none.
Cryptocurrency Is the One That Disappears Forever
Everything else in this article can eventually be recovered with enough paperwork and patience. Crypto held in self custody cannot, and families need to understand the distinction before they need to act on it.
- Know which kind you are dealing with. Crypto held at an exchange, meaning a company like Coinbase that holds the assets on your behalf, has a customer service department and a legal process. Crypto in self custody, meaning a hardware wallet or an app where the owner holds the keys, has neither. The only thing that opens it is the recovery phrase, usually twelve or twenty four words. If that is lost, the assets are gone permanently and no court order changes that.
- Exchanges want the standard estate packet. Coinbase publishes its requirements: the official death certificate, probate documentation such as letters testamentary, letters of administration, an affidavit for collection, or a small estate affidavit, a current valid government issued photo identification for the person named in those probate documents, and a signed letter from that person directing where to transfer the assets.
- Do not assume a beneficiary designation is available. Coinbase notes that it does not currently allow users to name beneficiaries on individual accounts, which means the estate plan or state law determines who receives the assets. Check this on every platform rather than assuming it works like a bank account.
- Never write a recovery phrase into a will. Same public record problem as passwords, with much higher stakes. Talk to your attorney about splitting the phrase, using a safe deposit box, or a purpose built custody arrangement, and about noting in the estate plan that the asset exists without disclosing how to reach it.
Domains and Photo Libraries, the Two Nobody Lists
These two get skipped for opposite reasons. A domain name feels too technical to be property, and a photo library feels too personal to be an asset. Both assumptions cause problems.
- A domain is often the most valuable thing a small business owns. It carries the website, the email addresses, and years of reputation. Domains are registered, not owned outright, and they lapse. When one lapses, anyone can register it. The estate plan should name the registrar, meaning the company where the domain is registered, and identify who takes over the account.
- Changing a domain’s registrant triggers a lock. Under ICANN’s transfer policy, which governs domain names globally, a registrar must apply a lock preventing transfer to a different registrar for sixty days after the registrant information changes, though registrars may let you opt out of that lock beforehand. If a business needs to move a domain during a transition, sequence matters, so ask before you click.
- Photo libraries need a download plan, not just an access plan. Google’s export tool, called Takeout, builds an archive you can send to Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, or Box, or download as a compressed file. Its download links expire after about seven days and each archive can be downloaded a limited number of times, so somebody has to be paying attention when it is ready. Apple has a comparable export process.
- Say where the copies should end up. “Give the photos to my daughter” is not actionable if the photos are eight hundred gigabytes and she has a laptop with a full hard drive. Naming an external drive or a family account in the plan turns a wish into an instruction.
The Language Your Attorney Needs and the Settings You Set Yourself
Texas has a statute built specifically for this, and most estate plans drafted before people thought about digital assets do not take advantage of it. Chapter 2001 of the Texas Estates Code is the state’s version of a model law called the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, or RUFADAA. A few of its rules should shape how your documents are written.
- The company’s own online tool outranks your will. A direction given through a provider’s planning feature overrides a contrary direction in a will, trust, or power of attorney. That means naming an Apple Legacy Contact, setting up Google’s Inactive Account Manager, and choosing a Facebook legacy contact are not optional extras. They are the top of the hierarchy, and if they conflict with your documents, they win.
- A power of attorney must expressly grant authority over message content. The statute distinguishes between an agent having general or specific authority over digital assets and having express authority over the content of electronic communications. Boilerplate will not get an agent into an email account. Ask your attorney directly whether your power of attorney contains that express grant.
- Trusts have their own rules. Where a trustee is the original account user, access is straightforward. Where the trustee is not, the statute looks for consent in the trust instrument for the content of electronic communications, and allows access to the catalog and other digital assets with a certification of trust. If a trust holds business assets, this language matters.
- Companies have a deadline, and it is enforceable. The statute gives a custodian sixty days after receiving the required information to comply with a request to disclose digital assets or terminate an account, and lets a fiduciary go to court if that deadline passes. Knowing this exists changes the tone of a stalled support ticket considerably.
The Bottom Line
Three things, in this order. Spend an evening writing an inventory of where things live, without credentials in it. Spend twenty minutes setting the online tools at Apple, Google, and Facebook, because under Texas law those settings sit at the top of the stack. Then take both of those to your estate attorney and ask specifically about digital asset authority in the will, the power of attorney, and any trust, and about how to handle a crypto recovery phrase without putting it in a public record.
Once more, this is general information and not legal advice, and your own estate attorney should draft and review your documents. If you want help building the inventory, exporting a photo library, locking down a business domain, or figuring out what accounts actually exist, get in touch with us here. We do this work for families and small businesses across Denton County, and it goes a lot easier before it is urgent.
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