You probably have more of your life online than you realize, from bank and investment apps to cloud photo libraries, email, and maybe even cryptocurrency that only lives on your phone or a hardware wallet. Those accounts feel routine in daily life, but every one of them can turn into a locked door if you are no longer here to log in. For families, that can mean lost money, lost records, and lost memories.
Many Floridians have carefully signed wills or trusts but have never talked with an attorney about digital assets at all. They assume that if documents handle the house, bank accounts, and retirement funds, everything else will fall into place. In practice, digital accounts and records are often where an otherwise solid estate plan quietly fails, simply because no one addressed how those assets will be accessed and managed.
At Your Advocates in Fort Myers, we regularly meet Southwest Florida clients whose estate plans were written long before online banking, social media, or crypto were part of everyday life. We help them update those plans so personal representatives, trustees, and agents can lawfully access and manage digital assets, instead of leaving families to guess passwords and negotiate with tech companies. In the rest of this guide, we share what we have learned about protecting digital assets through thoughtful Florida estate planning.
Contact our trusted estate planning lawyer in Fort Myers at (239) 970-6844 to schedule a free consultation.
Why Digital Assets Belong In Your Florida Estate Plan
Digital assets are no longer a curiosity or fringe issue. For many of our clients, real money and essential information live behind usernames and passwords. Online bank accounts, brokerage platforms, and payment apps can hold significant balances. Email accounts may contain invoices, contracts, or statements that no longer arrive by mail. If no one can get into those accounts when you die or become incapacitated, your fiduciaries may not even know what exists, much less how to claim or manage it.
Beyond pure dollars, digital assets can carry emotional and practical value. Cloud photo libraries, social media profiles, and shared drives often hold a family’s history. Password managers may be the only place you store login information for bill pay or tax software. For Florida residents who split time between states, online portals sometimes replace paper notices from out-of-state banks, condo associations, and investment advisors. If those accounts vanish from view, your estate can miss important obligations and opportunities.
We also see many Florida estate plans that were drafted before this digital shift. These documents often focus on traditional property, such as homes in Lee County, retirement accounts, and tangible personal items, but say little or nothing about digital records or online accounts. Even some newer documents rely on generic “all property” clauses that may not give clear guidance or authority for digital access. Updating an estate plan to reflect the reality of your online life is now an essential step in making sure your fiduciaries can actually carry out your wishes.
Because our attorneys at Your Advocates have more than 70 years of combined experience working with Florida wills, trusts, and related matters, we have watched this change happen in real time. We understand how older documents were drafted and how to bring them in line with the way people live and transact today. That experience helps us recognize where digital blind spots usually appear and how to close them before they create problems for your family.
What Counts As A Digital Asset In Estate Planning
Most people think of digital assets and immediately picture Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies. Crypto is one category, but it is only part of the picture. For estate planning purposes, a digital asset is any account, file, or property that exists primarily in electronic form and is accessed through an electronic device. Once you start listing them, you will usually see far more than you expected.
Financial digital assets are the easiest place to start. These include online bank and credit union accounts, investment and retirement platforms, payment apps such as PayPal or similar services, and, for some people, crypto exchanges or wallets. Even if you have a traditional relationship with a Fort Myers or Southwest Florida bank, you may receive statements and pay bills largely online now. If your personal representative or agent cannot get into those portals, it can be hard to gather information and move funds where they need to go.
Personal and lifestyle digital assets are just as important. Email accounts often serve as the hub for password resets and billing notices. Social media profiles hold years of photos and messages. Cloud storage and photo backup services may be the only place where family pictures and videos exist. Many clients use subscription services for everything from streaming to medical portals and insurance, all of which require logins that someone will need to manage when you are gone or no longer able to handle them yourself.
For business owners and professionals, digital assets can include domain names, websites, online storefronts, digital marketing accounts, and monetized channels or content libraries. A domain that points to a real estate business or professional practice in Fort Myers can be a key part of that enterprise’s value. If no one can access or transfer that domain or the associated hosting account, the business can suffer real reputational and financial damage. Even rewards points, airline miles, and hotel loyalty programs, although not always transferable, may have value that your plan should at least acknowledge.
At Your Advocates, we do not rely on generic lists. We walk each client through these categories and look at how they actually live and work online. That conversation often uncovers forgotten accounts and subscriptions that matter for their plan. By taking the time to understand your specific digital footprint, we can create an estate plan that fits your reality instead of assuming that everyone uses technology in the same way.
Why Your Family Cannot Simply "Log In" After You Are Gone
Many people relax after telling a spouse or adult child, “I keep all the passwords in this notebook,” or, “We share the password to my email.” That may seem like a practical solution, but it creates both legal and practical risks. Many major service providers prohibit password sharing in their terms of service. Logging in as someone else, even with permission, can violate those rules. In some situations, it can also raise concerns under computer access and privacy laws, especially once a person has died.
On a practical level, providers usually contract with the individual account holder, not with the family as a whole. After a death, companies often ask for proof of authority before they will release data, transfer funds, or close an account. If your personal representative or trustee does not have clear legal authority over digital assets, and your estate plan does not mention them, those providers may be unwilling to help. Families then face long delays, repeated requests for documents, or outright refusals, even when everyone agrees about your wishes.
Legal authority in this context typically belongs to a fiduciary. In estate planning, a fiduciary is the person you appoint to manage your affairs during your life or after your death, such as a personal representative of your estate, a trustee of your trust, or an agent under a durable power of attorney. For digital assets, the key question is whether those fiduciaries are clearly empowered in your documents to access, manage, and, where appropriate, close or transfer online accounts and digital property.
There is also a hard technical edge to these issues, especially with cryptocurrency and certain security-focused services. If a hardware wallet, private key, or seed phrase is lost, there is generally no “forgot password” option. No personal representative or court order can recreate a lost crypto key. In those situations, the combination of legal authority and technical access information has to be in place before anything goes wrong. Hoping that family members can guess their way in later is not a plan.
In our work with Florida families, we have seen how painful it can be when a deceased person’s main email account or financial app is inaccessible. Bills continue, statements stop, and the personal representative ends up trying to reconstruct accounts from scratch. At Your Advocates, we draft wills, trusts, and related documents with digital asset authority in mind, so fiduciaries do not resort to guessing passwords or navigating policies alone. Instead, they have the authority and instructions they need as part of the overall estate plan.
How Florida Estate Planning Documents Can Address Digital Assets
Modern estate planning in Florida uses familiar tools, such as wills, revocable living trusts, and durable powers of attorney. Each of these can, and should, clearly address digital assets. The goal is to give your fiduciaries both the authority and the roadmap to manage your digital property, without putting you at risk during your lifetime.
A Florida will names a personal representative to gather your probate assets, pay valid debts, and distribute property according to your instructions. With the right language, it can also grant that personal representative authority to access, control, and dispose of your digital assets that fall within the probate estate. That can include giving them the right to communicate with service providers, receive electronic records, and manage or close accounts as part of winding up your affairs.
A revocable living trust often plays a different role. Many clients transfer or title assets into a trust during life, then have the trust continue for the benefit of a spouse, children, or others after death. Digital assets can fit into this structure, especially when they relate to ongoing income or business operations. For example, an online store, a monetized website, or a domain name used in a real estate or professional practice can be owned or controlled through a trust. That allows a successor trustee to step in and keep the digital business functioning, rather than letting valuable accounts lapse.
The durable power of attorney focuses on incapacity planning. It allows an agent to act for you while you are still alive but unable, temporarily or permanently, to manage your own affairs. Here, specific digital powers matter. A well-drafted, durable power of attorney can give your agent authority to manage online banking, communicate with financial institutions through their secure portals, handle online bill pay, and interact with email and cloud storage necessary to manage your affairs. Without those explicit powers, an agent may find themselves locked out of the very tools they need.
At Your Advocates, we do not treat digital asset language as a boilerplate afterthought. Our attorneys draw on decades of Florida estate planning experience to review your existing documents and identify where more precise wording is needed. For clients in Fort Myers and across Southwest Florida, that often means updating wills, trusts, and powers of attorney that are otherwise sound, so they reflect how you actually hold and access property today.
Creating A Practical Digital Asset Inventory Without Sacrificing Security
Once you understand what counts as a digital asset and how your estate planning documents can address them, the next question is practical: how will your fiduciaries know what exists and how to access it? The answer is a digital asset inventory, created with both usability and security in mind. The inventory should be detailed enough to guide your fiduciaries, but structured so that it can be updated and kept safe during your life.
A digital asset inventory usually starts as a list. For each asset, you can identify the service or platform name, type of account, general purpose, and where to find more detailed access information. For example, you might note that you have a checking account at a particular bank with online access through a named app, a brokerage account at a specific institution, and a cloud storage account where family photos are stored. You do not have to write every password into this list. Instead, you can reference where login information is stored, such as a password manager or a secure physical location.
Security considerations matter. Writing passwords directly into a will or trust is rarely a good idea. Those documents can become public in probate, and they are not easily updated without formal steps. A more flexible approach is to store live credentials in a password manager or encrypted file and to give your fiduciaries instructions, in a separate memorandum or letter, about where that information is kept and how it can be accessed in an emergency. For crypto, you may also need to document where hardware wallets or backup phrases are stored and who is authorized to use them.
The inventory should also be designed to evolve. New accounts open, old accounts close, and platforms change. If every small change required you to see a lawyer and re-sign core documents, you would never keep up. A better model is to keep the estate planning documents focused on authority and broad categories, and then maintain the detailed inventory as a living document you can update yourself. At regular intervals, you can review the inventory, cross out what no longer exists, and add new entries as your digital life grows.
We frequently help clients at Your Advocates build and refine these inventories. Some prefer a handwritten list kept in a secure place. Others use digital tools and password managers. Our role is to help you choose a method you are comfortable with and make sure your documents and fiduciary appointments are aligned with that method. For clients across Fort Myers and Southwest Florida, this ongoing relationship means that when technology changes, their plans can adapt without starting from scratch.
Special Issues For Cryptocurrency And Online Businesses
Not all digital assets are created equal. Cryptocurrency, NFTs, and online businesses raise special challenges that require more careful planning. These assets can be valuable, portable, and highly technical. They can also be unusually fragile from an estate planning perspective. Losing a set of private keys or access credentials can destroy value in a way that simply does not happen with a traditional bank account.
With cryptocurrency, the core issue is control of the private keys or seed phrases. Those strings of characters are what allow you to move coins or tokens from one wallet to another. If they are lost or destroyed, there is usually no way to recreate them. Unlike a bank, there is no central office to call and verify your identity. That means your estate plan has to address both who is authorized to control those assets and how the keys will be stored and accessed if something happens to you. The plan should avoid exposing keys to unnecessary risk during your life, while ensuring that trusted fiduciaries can access them when needed.
Online businesses create different, but related, challenges. A successful e-commerce store, marketing site, or content channel may rely on domain registrations, hosting accounts, payment processors, advertising platforms, and social media. Each of those components has its own login and its own contractual relationship. If an owner dies or becomes incapacitated and no one can access the key accounts, the business can stall quickly. Customers may encounter broken sites, orders might go unfulfilled, and reputations can suffer real harm.
Estate planning can help here by clearly identifying which digital components belong to the business, who should manage them in an emergency, and how they are integrated with other business and property interests. For example, a revocable trust or business entity can hold domain names or ownership rights in online accounts, and the trust or company documents can spell out succession plans. A durable power of attorney can give an agent authority to keep business accounts running during a temporary incapacity. Coordinating these tools helps ensure that your online enterprise is not left to chance.
Because Your Advocates works across multiple practice areas, including real estate and estate planning, we are accustomed to looking at the full picture. For many Southwest Florida clients, this means coordinating physical property, business interests, and digital operations in one coherent plan. We help you think through which fiduciaries have the skills and support to handle complex digital assets, and where professional assistance might be needed to carry out your wishes effectively.
Common Digital Asset Planning Mistakes We See In Florida
Even clients who have done thoughtful estate planning can overlook digital assets in ways that create real problems later. Recognizing these patterns can help you spot similar gaps in your own situation. The good news is that many of these mistakes can be addressed with a careful review and targeted updates.
One frequent mistake is relying on informal password sharing. Clients often tell us that spouses or children “know where everything is” or have a shared login to key accounts. Aside from the fact that this can violate terms of service, it also tends to break down over time. Passwords get changed, new accounts are opened, and the mental or written list stops matching reality. When something unexpected happens, the family discovers that their assumptions about access were badly out of date.
Another mistake is ignoring non-financial digital assets. Families often focus on money and forget about email, photos, and social media. A personal representative who cannot access email may miss important notifications about investments, real estate, or legal obligations. If no one can reach cloud photo accounts or social media platforms, years of family history can be locked away. Disagreement over what should happen to online profiles can also cause unnecessary conflict at a time when families need unity.
We also see problems when plans fail to account for new categories of digital property. For example, a person might begin investing small amounts in cryptocurrency without ever mentioning this to anyone or updating their documents. What begins as a minor side investment can grow over time. If the person dies or becomes incapacitated without any record of where those assets are held or how they can be accessed, the value can disappear completely.
At Your Advocates, we have helped Florida families work through the fallout of these oversights, but it is far better to address them on the front end. By revisiting your documents, inventorying your digital footprint, and updating fiduciary authority, you can convert weak spots into strengths. Our experience with these recurring issues allows us to anticipate where things are likely to break down and to suggest practical fixes that match your comfort level with technology.
Take The Next Step To Protect Your Digital Assets & Legacy
Your online accounts, records, and digital property are now part of your real estate and estate planning picture, whether or not they appear in your current documents. A thoughtful Florida estate plan can do more than pass on your home and savings. It can also help ensure that your fiduciaries can lawfully access your financial apps, locate important records, preserve family photos, and manage or wind down online businesses in the way you would want.
A good starting point is simple. Begin a draft list of your digital assets, even if it is rough, and gather your current will, trust, and powers of attorney. Once you see those items in front of you, it becomes easier to spot where digital assets are missing or where your documents may be silent or outdated. From there, a focused conversation with an attorney can turn that awareness into a concrete plan that fits your life in Fort Myers and throughout Southwest Florida.
At Your Advocates, we work closely with each client to review existing documents, identify digital gaps, and design an approach that balances access and security. We see this as an ongoing relationship, not a one-time transaction, because we know technology and your online footprint will continue to change. If you are ready to bring your digital assets into your estate plan and protect the people who depend on you, we welcome the chance to talk.
Call (239) 970-6844 to schedule a time to discuss how to integrate your digital assets into a Florida estate plan that truly reflects your life.