Who speaks for you when you can’t speak for yourself? Who handles your stuff when you can’t? What do they need to know? What are they supposed to do with them? How can you make it easier for the people who act for you under a power of attorney or will? Let’s focus on a growing area, digital assets and access.
Here’s why you should include digital access and assets in your contingency and legacy plans.
So what are digital assets?
At a high level, digital assets include all of the electronic “possessions” you may have, including:
Digital assets include all of the electronic “possessions” you may have, including emails, all of your electronic folders, social media sites like Facebook, Linkedin, Pinterest and Twitter. Think about digital photos, videos, tweets, texts, songs including iTunes and e‐books. You may have paid for them or you may have authored them. Then there are storage sites offered by Google and Yahoo.
What about all that electronic banking and those transactions you may be engaged in, including PayPal, the Apple Store and Amazon. Then there are loyalty programs, including airlines, hotels, retail stores, gas stations and car rental agencies.
You may be running a blog, a personal website, business on the internet, handling requests for your products and services and associated billings and receipts. You may also be using one or more of the growing cryptocurrencies.
All of this is worth something.
"By 2020, the average Canadian upon death will have stored electronic value north of $10,000. For wealthier Canadians, that value could be about $50,000."1
Including digital assets is becoming an important trend in estate planning as assets of valuable continue to move to a digital format. To learn how to properly include them, please refer to the complete article here.
(1) Source: Duncan Stewart, Director of Research, Technology, Media and Telecommunications at Deloitte Canada; updated May 11, 2018 in The Canadian Press.
Republished with permission by Peter Wouters. For the complete list of articles, please visit here.