What Is a Digital Estate Plan? Give Your Family Access After You Die

What a digital estate plan includes

• An inventory of accounts: email, cloud storage, social media, banking, subscriptions
• Cryptocurrency: where it is held and how it can be recovered
• Devices and the ways to unlock them, including two-factor codes and recovery keys
• Domains, websites and digital businesses
• Instructions and messages for the people who will deal with all this

Why a will is not enough

A will says who inherits your property. It does not open your phone. In many places a will becomes a public record when it is proved in court, so writing passwords into it is unsafe. And a will is usually read after weeks or months — long after some accounts are locked or closed.

Some providers offer a legacy contact or inactive-account setting for their own services, such as Google and Apple. They are useful, but they cover only those services, not the rest of your digital life.

How to build one in five steps

• 1. List what you have — start with email, phone, cloud photos, money and crypto.
• 2. Decide who should get access to what, and who should not.
• 3. Store the access details securely, never in a will or a shared note.
• 4. Choose when access should open: on a date, or after a careful, confirmed trigger.
• 5. Review it every year and whenever you change a device, a provider or a wallet.

Mistakes that quietly break plans

• One trusted person holds everything — a single point of failure
• A list that goes stale the day a password changes
• Forgetting the second factor: the authenticator app on the phone that no one can unlock
• Leaving credentials but no instructions about what to do with them

Where Wirātha fits

Wirātha keeps the inventory in one place, locks the sensitive parts in a vault that needs two of three people you chose, runs a careful dead man’s switch and delivers your messages — and it also shows how your estate divides under your faith and your country’s law.