When someone passes, the hard part often isn’t the house or the investment accounts. Those are documented somewhere. It’s the email that holds years of correspondence, the photos stored in a cloud account no one can open or the subscriptions that keep charging because no one knows they exist. A whole layer of a person’s life can sit just out of reach, protected by passwords no one has access to.
Most estate plans still don’t account for any of this. They were built for a world of paper, while our lives became digital. We’ve seen families spend months trying to recover accounts they didn’t even know were there. It adds up to more than most people realize:
- Bank, brokerage, and retirement accounts
- Cryptocurrency and digital wallets
- Email accounts and cloud storage
- Digital photo and video libraries
- Social media profiles
- Websites, blogs, and domain names
- Airline miles, hotel rewards, and credit card points
- Subscription services and digital media libraries
- Smart home accounts and connected devices
A short list of what you have, and how to reach it, spares the people you love a great deal of frustration later.