Estate planning now includes electronic considerations.
Estate planning in a digital era encompasses more than just the material things you possess. These days, you have to consider your digital existence as well as your temporal one.
When planning your estate, you need to think about your digital accumulations and accounts such as air miles, loyalty points, bank points, cryptocurrency and social media.
"It's our electronic lives online," said Sharon Hartung, a technology adviser and the author of Your Digital Undertaker.
"We wouldn't dismiss a bank account with thousands of dollars in it, so we really shouldn't ignore our digital assets," she said.
Most states have laws addressing what happens to a person's digital assets, but there can be a tension between access for heirs and online privacy. In 2016, the South Carolina legislature passed its version of the Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets, which lays down rules for when the companies that maintain such digital assets need to disclose them to an executor.
"That was an attempt to start to grapple with these issues in a way that was satisfactory both to us as estate planners and attorneys and the various online cloud-based services where people are doing their business," said Mike Polk of Belser & Belser in Columbia, who chairs the S.C. Bar Association Technology Committee.
Polk said the law gives people more autonomy as to what they pass on and recommended that people occasionally check the terms of service for their most important digital products for potential changes.
But, experts advise, you shouldn't pass along account passwords to heirs and beneficiaries without giving explicit access permission, since this technically violates federal laws against online fraud.
"All the same barriers that have been put in place to protect us from identity theft and cybercrime are the same barriers to the executor," Hartung said.
If you or your business have digital assets, let your attorney of beneficiary know, and let them know...
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