By Rick Waechter, Founder

Many of us have dozens, and some of us hundreds, of apps and logins to digital sites. Do you know what will happen to them when you die?

Unless you have a digital wallet for your Bitcoin that’s worth a lot of money, this may seem trivial.

But here are a few scenarios that should give you, or someone you know, pause:

• You have entered your credit card details into various sites. A hacker discovers you have just died and gains access to your account and your card details before the account or card is closed. The card issuer cannot contact you to check suspicious charges. By the time the card is frozen, there are thousands of dollars of charges which your survivors will have to sort out.
• You had the only login to the website where you stored thousands of precious family photos. Unless you empower someone else to access the site (or make sure they have the login), the photos are essentially lost.
• You would like your LinkedIn page to be taken down when you die, but the executor of your last will has no rights to do so, because there is no mention in your will about digital rights. It will remain online as long as LinkedIn exists as a website.

Many of you have gone to great lengths to plan for your death by doing careful estate planning and by creating a financial nest egg for a spouse or the next generation. Make sure you take the same care so that your digital footprint doesn’t create a hassle or a financial disaster when you die.

Here are simple steps you can take:

1. Appoint a digital executor. They should be technically proficient, and they should know what you want to happen to your online accounts -- for example, whether to close them all or keep several as memorials. Your digital executor may be the same person as the executor of your last will. Make this appointment explicit in your last will.
2. Create a list of all your digital assets including user IDs, passwords, and answers to security questions. The easiest way to do this is to consolidate everything in an online password manager service/app. You would then give to your digital executor the master password for the online password manager service/app. That person would also need access to your cellphone for 2-factor authentication.
3. For the sites you care about, learn how you can appoint someone to manage the account at your death. Following these procedures will be easier for your digital executor than going through the court-administered probate process. Here are three examples of the procedures at popular sites:
1. LinkedIn allows someone to memorialize your site or shut it down. But they will need to prove they can act for you. Make sure your last will makes that explicit.
2. Facebook allows you in advance to request your account be memorialized or deleted, or you can name a legacy contact who can manage it after you die.
3. Amazon requires legal paperwork (typically from the court issued through the probate process) to terminate Amazon Prime, close someone’s account, etc.
4. In your financial power of attorney, make sure someone can act for you on digital assets if you are incapacitated, and make sure they know what they need to do.

None of this is as important as traditional estate planning. But some work now could save your survivors a lot of annoyance, and potentially avoid fraud.