Digital Assets in Your Will: Crypto, Accounts and Online Legacies

Anything you own or control that lives on a screen, which is genuinely the broadest and most accurate definition I can give you. People hear "digital assets" and immediately think crypto, but it is so much wider than that and I find myself correcting this assumption constantly.

Think about a normal Tuesday: you check email, tap into your banking app, scroll Instagram for five minutes that turns into twenty, and pay for something on Amazon. Every one of those actions involves an account, and every account holds something worth protecting, whether that is money, personal data, or thirty years of family photos sitting in Google Drive that nobody has bothered backing up anywhere else.

If it lives behind a login, it is probably a digital asset, which is a quick rule of thumb worth remembering.

Your email accounts on Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo matter more than people realise because they are the master key, and whoever controls the email can reset passwords on everything else, which is something I wish more people thought about when they casually share their email password with nobody. Social media profiles on Facebook, Instagram, X, and LinkedIn carry either sentimental weight or commercial weight, and sometimes both. Online banking covers current accounts, savings, ISAs, trading platforms, and pension dashboards.

Then there is cloud storage through iCloud, Google Photos, and Dropbox, where for a lot of families decades of irreplaceable memories exist only in the cloud with no prints and no backups, meaning everything would simply vanish if the subscription lapses. I find this one genuinely upsetting because the loss is so preventable.

Cryptocurrency, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, and the rest, deserves particular attention and I will come back to it because it has its own set of problems that honestly deserve their own section entirely.

People also forget about online businesses like eBay shops, Etsy stores, and Amazon seller accounts, alongside websites, domain names, digital subscriptions, loyalty points and air miles that can be worth hundreds of pounds if you have been hoarding them, and Kindle libraries and Steam game collections. Licensing terms limit what is actually transferable with that last group, but they still need dealing with.

The average UK adult has something like 100 online accounts, and nobody believes that number when they first hear it, but go and count yours and you will surprise yourself.

Twenty years ago, sorting out someone's estate meant a house, some savings, maybe jewellery and a car, but that world is basically gone because a massive chunk of most people's lives now sits behind screens and passwords, and the money involved is not small.

Starting with the financial side, UK adults hold billions across online accounts, investment platforms, and crypto wallets. A PayPal balance or a share dealing account can hold serious money, and here is the bit people miss: if your family does not know it is there, they will never go looking. I have spoken to families who discovered investment accounts months later purely by accident, and some never discover them at all.

Sentimental value matters just as much, and sometimes more. Cloud storage full of family photos that exist nowhere else, with no printed copies and no negatives, means that if nobody can log in the photos simply vanish for good. I keep coming back to this point because it is the one that hits people hardest when they actually sit and think about it.

There is a cost problem too, and it is more annoying than you would think, because subscriptions keep charging a dead person's bank account until someone cancels them. Netflix, gym memberships, software licences, domain hosting: left alone those small charges add up to hundreds over a few months, and I have seen estate accounts drained by recurring payments that nobody caught for nearly a year.

Running an online business, even a tiny Etsy shop or consultancy website, depends entirely on account access, and having no handover plan means the whole thing dies the same day you do.

Then there is the security angle that people completely overlook, because dormant accounts are targets and a dead person's email that nobody monitors is a goldmine for identity theft. Sometimes the victims are the surviving family members, which adds a layer of cruelty to an already terrible situation.

And despite all of this, fewer than one in five UK adults have done anything about their digital assets in their estate planning, while the other four out of five are just leaving a growing pile of value and risk with no plan attached.

Every platform handles this differently, almost none of them make it easy, and honestly most of the processes feel like they were designed to discourage you. I find the whole landscape deeply frustrating because these are companies with billions in engineering talent and they still cannot build a humane bereavement process.

Google has this thing called "Inactive Account Manager," and to their credit it is probably the best system out there, where you set it up while you are alive and it decides what happens to your data after a stretch of inactivity. It either shares your data with people you choose or deletes the lot, but the problem is that barely anyone turns it on. If you have not, your family submits a formal request with a death certificate and proof of relationship, after which Google might grant limited access or might not, entirely at their discretion. I have heard of families waiting months for a response, which is appalling when you think about the grief they are already dealing with.

Meta's memorialisation process for Facebook and Instagram is a strange experience, because a memorialised account stays visible but nobody can log in, frozen in time. You pick a "legacy contact" in your settings who manages the profile after you die, pins a tribute post, and responds to friend requests, though your family can request full deletion instead. The legacy contact feature is actually pretty well thought out, I will give them that, but you have to set it up before you need it and almost nobody does.

Apple introduced a "Digital Legacy" programme where you name contacts who can access your iCloud data after death, and without that set up in advance Apple will not hand over account contents. Not to your spouse, not to anyone, even if they are standing in the Apple Store explaining the situation through tears. Courts can force it, but that route is slow and expensive and frankly nobody should have to go through a legal process to get their dead partner's photos.

Online banks and investment platforms are the most cooperative, mostly because the law actually requires them to release funds once probate comes through. You provide a death certificate, grant of probate, and executor's ID, and they process it, though each bank runs its own timeline and dealing with five or six platforms in parallel is genuinely draining work that I would not wish on anyone already grieving.

Subscriptions like Netflix, Spotify, and Amazon Prime are simpler but irritating because they are non-transferable, someone needs to cancel them, that requires access to the email or payment method, and until then they keep billing. It is a small thing individually but it compounds.

The pattern across all of this is boringly predictable: access is dramatically easier when the account holder planned ahead, and legacy contacts, inactive account settings, and a clear record of what exists all serve as groundwork that saves your family weeks of frustration.

Your Will can and should cover digital assets, but there is one rule that matters more than anything else, and I am going to bold it because people keep ignoring it: never put passwords, PINs, or security codes in the Will itself.

That is not a suggestion but a serious warning, because once probate is granted your Will becomes a public document. Anyone can request a copy from the Probate Registry for a few pounds, and passwords written in there would expose every login, every account, and every piece of personal data you have to complete strangers. I have lost count of how many people I have had to talk out of writing their banking password into their Will.

So what should actually go in the Will? A general clause directing your executor to deal with digital assets as part of the estate administration. Specific gifts where they make sense, like leaving a domain name portfolio to a particular person or directing that an online business goes to a named beneficiary. Your wishes for social media accounts. And a reference to a separate, securely stored document where your executor can find the actual access details.

As for what should absolutely not go in: passwords, PINs, and seed phrases under any circumstances. Do not include specific account balances either, because they shift constantly and become misleading within months. And avoid instructions that conflict with a platform's terms of service, because your Will cannot override Apple's licensing agreement, nobody's can, and pretending otherwise just creates confusion for your executor.

A sample clause might read:

"I direct my executors to deal with all my digital assets, including but not limited to online accounts, digital currencies, domain names, and digital media, in accordance with the Digital Asset Inventory I have prepared and stored separately. I wish my social media accounts to be memorialised where that option is available, and deleted where it is not."

That wording is clean, keeps the sensitive details out of the public record, and makes your intentions legally clear.

Right, so if passwords do not belong in the Will, where do they actually go? You need something that is secure while you are alive but reachable by your executor after you die, and surprisingly few options manage both of those things well.

A password manager with emergency access is probably the best approach, and it is what I personally use because it stores all your logins in one encrypted vault behind a single master password through services like 1Password, Bitwarden, or LastPass. Some have built-in emergency access features where a nominated person requests entry after a waiting period you set. For estate planning, what matters is this: your executor needs to know which password manager you use and how to trigger that access, which might mean giving your master password to your solicitor in a sealed envelope or including it in a separate inventory kept somewhere genuinely secure.

Or go low tech and write out your accounts and access details, seal the letter, and give it to your solicitor or executor with instructions to open it only on your death. No encryption, no software, just paper, and it works fine as long as you actually update it when passwords change, which people tend not to do. I have seen meticulously prepared letters that were already outdated by the time they were opened because the person changed their banking password eighteen months earlier and never thought to update the letter.

There are also digital vault services like DeadMansSwitch or Google's Inactive Account Manager that can send pre-written messages or access details to nominated people after a period of inactivity. They are useful as a backup, but I would not lean on them as your only option because services shut down, companies get acquired, and technology moves on in ways you cannot predict.

Whatever you pick, your executor needs three pieces of information: that a Digital Asset Inventory exists, where it is stored, and how to get into it, and missing any one of those three means the whole thing falls apart.

Crypto gets its own section because it works nothing like any other asset, and I genuinely mean nothing, because if you get the planning wrong here the money is not hard to reach but permanently gone. No appeals process, no court order that can recover it, nothing at all.

For those who need a quick background, cryptocurrency is digital money that no bank or government controls. Bitcoin is the famous one, alongside thousands of others like Ethereum, Litecoin, and Solana. You buy, sell, and hold them a bit like shares, but the technology underneath is completely different and that difference is what creates the estate planning problem.

Crypto is stored in a "wallet," which is really just a pair of cryptographic keys, where the public key works like an account number and the private key authorises spending. Whoever holds the private key controls the funds, and there is no bank to phone, no password reset button, and no customer service line to fall back on. It is both the beauty and the horror of the technology, depending on your perspective.

When you set up a wallet you get a "seed phrase," typically 12 or 24 random words in a specific order, that can regenerate your private key and restore access from any device, which means that in every practical sense those words are your money.

Losing the seed phrase means losing the crypto permanently because no recovery process exists, and the funds sit on the blockchain forever, visible to everyone but spendable by nobody. I find this concept genuinely difficult to explain to people who are used to banks, because "there is literally nobody to phone" does not compute for most people until it is too late.

Now, there is a difference between exchange accounts and private wallets that matters enormously for your family. If your crypto sits on an exchange like Coinbase, Kraken, or Binance, your executor contacts them with a death certificate and probate documents, which is slow but doable through a standard bereavement process, and honestly I have been pleasantly surprised by how Coinbase handles this compared to some of the social media platforms. If your crypto is in a private wallet, whether a hardware device like a Ledger or Trezor or a software wallet on your phone, the only way in is the private key or seed phrase, with no middleman to contact and nobody to appeal to.

What should you do? Write down which cryptos you hold and where, store seed phrases and private keys physically away from the devices in a bank safe deposit box or fireproof safe, and tell your executor that crypto is part of the estate, where the recovery information is, and roughly how access works. If they are not tech-savvy, name someone who is.

Step-by-step instructions help enormously here, something like: "Open this device, enter this PIN, the seed phrase is in the safe deposit box at Barclays on the High Street." That level of detail can be the literal difference between your family inheriting your holdings and those holdings vanishing into nothing.

The scale of this problem is staggering, because Chainalysis estimates that about 20% of all Bitcoin ever created, worth hundreds of billions, is permanently locked because owners lost their keys or died without passing them on. One in five Bitcoin, just sitting there unclaimed and unspendable, and that statistic should make anyone with a crypto wallet stop and think about what they have actually done to protect it.

It sounds fancy but it is literally just a list of every digital account and asset you hold, with enough detail for your executor to find, access, and deal with each one, and I promise it is not as overwhelming as it sounds once you actually start.

For each account, write down the name of the service, the web address if it is not obvious, the username or email you log in with, what the account is for in plain language like "main email" or "family photos" or "crypto exchange holding roughly 0.5 Bitcoin," what you want done with it whether that is transfer or memorialise or delete or cancel, and any two-factor authentication details. That last point is the one that trips executors up constantly because they get the password right and then hit a wall asking for a code sent to a phone that is locked in a drawer somewhere, and I cannot tell you how often I hear about exactly this scenario.

If this inventory is stored alongside your Will, leave passwords out of it, but if it is stored separately in a genuinely secure spot that will not become public, like a sealed envelope with your solicitor, then passwords can go in.

How do you actually compile it? Start with your email inbox and search for "welcome," "verify your email," or "your account," and you will find dozens of services you had completely forgotten about. Check your browser's saved passwords under Settings then Passwords or Autofill, then go through bank statements for recurring charges because every subscription is an account. Scroll every app on your phone, since anything with a login counts, and if you already use a password manager you can export the list and start from there, which is the easiest version of this exercise by far.

Keep it updated by setting a reminder every six months, adding new things and removing closed ones, because an outdated inventory is still better than nothing but a current one is obviously better. The update takes about fifteen minutes if you stay on top of it, so put it in your calendar now or it will not happen.

All of this planning is completely pointless if your executor does not know about it, and this is the step that people skip. They do the hard work of making the inventory, setting up the password manager, getting everything documented, and then never actually tell anyone, which drives me mad because the whole effort is wasted.

Digital assets are invisible, and unlike a house or a car they leave no physical trace. Your executor will not stumble across your crypto wallet while clearing out the spare room, and they will not find a letter from your investment platform in a pile of post, so if they do not know it exists they will never go looking and the money just sits there indefinitely.

Have the conversation, because it does not need to be dramatic. Sit down with your executor and explain, broadly, that you have digital assets, you have made an inventory, and here is where it is kept. You do not need to share passwords or walk through every account, and they just need to know there is a plan and where to find it.

Cover the basics: the inventory exists and where to find it, how to access it whether that is a master password or a sealed envelope at the solicitor's office or something else, and that some accounts hold money while others hold irreplaceable memories. If you hold crypto, flag it specifically because it needs careful handling and possibly someone with technical knowledge. Subscriptions need cancelling quickly because those direct debits do not stop themselves, and every major platform from Google to Facebook to Apple has its own bereavement process, each of them slightly different and each of them requiring slightly different paperwork, which is the kind of administrative nightmare your executor will appreciate being warned about in advance.

If your executor is not comfortable with technology, that is fine, and honestly most people over a certain age are not because there is no shame in that. Name a tech-savvy friend or family member who can handle the digital side, and your Will can include a clause asking executors to seek help from a specific person for digital matters. It is an informal arrangement but one that works well in practice, and I have seen it save families an enormous amount of stress.

The whole point is that when the time comes your executor should not be guessing, and they should know what is there, where to find access, and what you wanted done with each thing.

The law here is a mess, and I will be honest about that because I think you deserve a straight answer rather than a cautiously worded one. No single statute covers digital assets and inheritance in England and Wales, and the rules are scattered, most of them have not been properly tested in court, and the legislation was written before half of these platforms existed.

Here is where things stand. Digital assets with financial value, things like cryptocurrency, PayPal balances, domain names, and online business accounts, are generally treated as property and pass through your Will like any other asset, which is the part that actually works and makes intuitive sense.

Personal digital assets are murkier because social media profiles, email content, and photos may not technically be "owned" by you in a legal sense. Most platforms retain ownership under their terms of service and just grant you a licence, and that licence typically dies when you do. I think this is something most people would find surprising and probably unfair, but it is the current reality.

Then there is the Computer Misuse Act 1990, which makes it a criminal offence to access someone else's account without authorisation. In theory, your executor logging into your email without the platform explicitly saying "go ahead" could breach this, and in practice nobody has been prosecuted for doing so in a bereavement situation, but the legal grey area remains and it is the kind of thing that makes conscientious executors nervous.

GDPR adds yet another layer because platforms can refuse to hand over account contents on privacy grounds, even to executors, unless the account holder gave consent beforehand. Most people have not given that consent because most people do not know this is even a thing, which feels like a failure of communication on the platforms' part if I am being honest.

Day to day, what does this actually mean for you? Your executor has clear authority over financial digital assets through probate under the normal process, and for non-financial accounts the platforms' bereavement policies run alongside the law, sometimes agreeing with it and sometimes contradicting it entirely.

Setting up legacy contacts, inactive account managers, and digital asset clauses in your Will does not guarantee access to everything, but it puts your executor in the strongest position available. Written wishes plus practical access arrangements is the best anyone can do right now, which I know is not a satisfying answer but it is an honest one.

The Law Commission has flagged this whole area as needing reform, and changes will come eventually, but until then planning ahead is genuinely your best protection because waiting for the law to catch up is not a strategy that has ever worked for anyone.

You do not need to do this all in one go, and half an hour today will get you most of the way there.

Start by making a list, going through your email, your phone, and your bank statements, and writing down every digital account you can find without worrying about being perfect on the first pass since you will remember more later. I did this myself a couple of years ago and was genuinely shocked at how many accounts I had forgotten about.

Then work out which ones actually matter by asking which hold money, which hold photos you cannot replace, and which run a business, because those are the priority and everything else can wait.

Go and set up legacy features on the platforms that offer them, including Google's Inactive Account Manager, Facebook's legacy contact, and Apple's Digital Legacy. Each takes about five minutes and it is five minutes that could save your family weeks of misery. Most people skip this step because it feels morbid, which is a terrible reason to skip anything that is actually useful.

Sort out secure storage by picking a method, whether a password manager, sealed letter, or secure vault, and getting your credentials stored somewhere your executor can actually reach when the time comes. Not "somewhere safe" in the vague sense, but specifically somewhere they know about and can physically or digitally access.

Update your Will by adding a digital assets clause and referencing your inventory, and if you do not have a Will yet then this is one more reason on the pile, which is getting to be quite a tall pile at this point.

Talk to your executor and tell them the plan exists, where to find it, and who to call for help with the technical bits, because this conversation takes ten minutes and it is the single most impactful thing you can do.

Set a reminder to review everything twice a year, because digital lives move fast and new accounts appear, old ones close, and passwords change. A quick check in January and July keeps things current, so put it in your calendar now or you will forget because everyone forgets.

All of this takes a few hours total and costs nothing, while the alternative is your family trying to untangle your digital life blind, with no list, no access, and no idea what even exists. That causes real distress, real financial loss, and the kind of regret that sits with people for a long time.

Keystone Estate Planning is an estate planning service, not a law firm. The information in this guide is for general educational purposes and should not be taken as legal, financial, or tax advice. Laws change, and every person's circumstances are different.

If your estate involves significant cryptocurrency holdings, complex digital business interests, or cross-border assets, we would recommend speaking to a solicitor who specialises in estate planning or digital asset law.

Our online Will-writing service includes a step for recording your wishes about digital assets. We walk you through it clearly and help you produce a legally valid Will that covers your full estate, digital and physical.