Technology is changing so rapidly that people and the law are not keeping up. This creates problems in estate planning.
It was not that long ago when the Internet was new and primarily seen as nothing more than a source of entertainment for most people. That has changed dramatically.
More and more people are now conducting business online and our digital accounts have become a large part of our personal lives.
When planning their estates, however, people have not kept up with the pace of technology.
People do not think about how they want any digital assets that they have to be passed on to their heirs.
Laws have also not kept pace, as Investment News discusses in “Most estate plans aren’t dealing with digital assets properly.”
By default, what happens to digital accounts and assets after we pass away is a patchwork of the individual terms of services of the different websites that we use.
Every website has different rules about the accounts and whether they can be passed to heirs and under what circumstances they can be passed down.
Some states have attempted to address this problem by adopting proposed uniform laws, but there is a long way to go for the law to catch up with technology.
If you would like to have a say in what happens to your digital accounts after you pass away, it is important that you speak with an estate planning attorney about it, so you can make appropriate plans.
Reference: Investment News (May 11, 2017) “Most estate plans aren’t dealing with digital assets properly.”
