How to Add Digital Assets to Your Estate Plan

Most people think of estate planning as sorting out the house, the savings account, and who gets the car. But a growing portion of what people own today does not exist in any physical form. It lives on a phone, behind a password, or inside a digital wallet.

Think about what you have right now. A PayPal balance. Crypto sitting in an app. Years of photos stored in the cloud. Streaming subscriptions tied to your credit card. A Gmail account with a decade of correspondence. Airline miles that took years to build. None of these things show up in a traditional will unless you put them there on purpose.

When someone dies without leaving instructions for their digital life, one of two things usually happens. Family members spend months trying to get into accounts and hit walls because platforms have strict identity policies. Or those accounts go dormant and eventually get deleted, taking everything stored in them along. Adding digital assets to your estate plan is not complicated. You need to know where to start.

What Counts as a Digital Asset

Before you can plan for something, you need to know what it includes. Digital assets are broader than most people expect, and they fall into three main categories.

Financial Digital Assets

These are the ones with direct monetary value. Cryptocurrency is the obvious example, but this category also includes PayPal and Venmo balances, investment accounts held in apps like Robinhood or Coinbase, loyalty points and airline miles, and any prepaid balances tied to an online account. If it holds money or can be converted into money, it counts.

Personal And Sentimental Digital Assets

These may not have a dollar value, but they matter. Your Google Photos library, your personal blog, your email archive, your social media profiles, and any creative work stored online all fall under this. For many families, these are the things they want access to most after a loved one is gone.

Subscription And Access-Based Assets

This includes streaming services, software licenses, purchased content on platforms like Amazon or iTunes, and accounts with stored payment methods or auto-renewals running. Many of these cannot legally be transferred to another person under platform terms, but your family still needs to know they exist so they can cancel them and avoid ongoing charges.

Why Digital Assets Get Lost Without a Plan

Physical assets leave a paper trail. A house has a deed. A bank account has statements. Digital assets usually lack that, which creates three specific problems.

Passwords Die With You

Without written access instructions, your family cannot access your accounts, even if they want to. Most platforms require identity verification that only you can provide. Some permanently lock accounts after a period of inactivity or after a death report is filed. By the time your family realizes what they are missing, access may already be gone permanently.

Legal Ownership Online Is Different From What You Expect

Owning a digital account is not the same as owning a physical object. When you buy a movie on iTunes or a book on Kindle, you are buying a license to access that content, not the content itself. That license typically cannot be transferred to another person. This matters because it changes what your heirs can actually receive versus what disappears when your account closes.

There Is No Physical Paper Trail

A house, a car, and a savings account all generate documents over time. Digital assets generate nothing unless you create records yourself. If you do not document them, your family will not know they exist. Real money, real memories, and real accounts can vanish simply because no one thought to write them down.

Read: Do I Need an Attorney for Estate Planning?

How to Take Inventory of Your Digital Assets

The first practical step is making a complete list. You cannot plan for what you have not identified.

Start with your financial accounts. List every platform that holds money or something that can be converted into money. For cryptocurrency, write down wallet addresses and seed phrases in a secure location. For apps like PayPal or Venmo, note the account email and approximate balance. For rewards programs, list the program name and account number.

Next, go through your personal accounts. For each one, decide what you want to happen to it. Some options to consider:

• Transfer the account or its contents to a specific person
• Memorialize it so it stays visible but no longer active
• Delete it entirely so it does not remain open online
• Donate stored value, such as airline miles, to a charity

For subscriptions, the main goal is making sure nothing continues to charge your estate or your family after you are gone. A simple list of active subscriptions with the account email is enough.

One important rule: do not put passwords directly in your will. A will becomes public record after probate so that anyone can read it. Instead, store credentials in a secure place, such as a password manager or an encrypted document, and leave instructions in your will pointing a trusted person to that location.

How to Legally Include Digital Assets in Your Estate Plan

Making a list is the foundation. The next step is ensuring the list has legal weight.

Add A Digital Assets Clause To Your Will Or Trust

A will or trust document can include a section that explicitly gives your executor or trustee the authority to access, manage, and transfer your digital accounts. Without this clause, they may have no legal right to act on your behalf, even if they know every password. Most states have adopted laws that allow this kind of authorization, but it has to be written into the document to be enforceable.

Name A Digital Executor

Some people choose to name a separate digital executor, a person specifically responsible for handling online accounts and digital property. This can be the same person as your general executor, or someone else, such as a younger family member who is comfortable navigating digital platforms. Naming someone specifically for this role removes any confusion about who is in charge of your online life.

Use A Secure Digital Vault For Organized Storage

A digital vault is a secure, encrypted space where you can store all your account information, access instructions, and asset details in one organized place. Unlike a notebook or a spreadsheet saved on your desktop, a digital vault is designed to be shared safely with the right people at the right time. It connects directly to your estate plan, so your executor has everything they need without digging through old emails or guessing which accounts even exist.

What Is Beem and Where Does It Fit?

Beem is a financial wellness app built for everyday Americans who want better control over their money without complicated tools or expensive advisors. It brings together income tracking, expense management, and financial protection in one place and is designed for people managing real budgets and real financial stress.

For estate planning, Beem has partnered with GoodTrust, a digital estate planning platform with over 800,000 members nationwide. Through this partnership, Beem members get access to GoodTrust’s full Smart Estate Planning suite as a core membership benefit. That includes wills, trusts, healthcare directives, power of attorney, and the GoodTrust Digital Vault.

The Digital Vault is the feature most directly relevant to this topic. It is built specifically to help you store, organize, and pass on digital asset information securely, so that instead of managing a separate spreadsheet or hoping your family knows your passwords, everything lives inside your estate plan in one place and is accessible when it matters most.

How to Get Started With Beem and GoodTrust

GoodTrust is designed so that you do not need a lawyer or a long back-and-forth process to get started. The whole plan, including the Digital Vault, can be completed online from any device. No office visits, no medical exams, and no complicated paperwork.

Here is what the GoodTrust plan includes for Beem members:

• A legally valid will, attorney-approved across all 50 states
• A trust with unlimited updates as your life changes
• Healthcare directives and power of attorney documents
• Guardian naming for children and dependents
• A Digital Vault for organizing and passing on digital assets
• A family plan covering up to four adult family members

For someone who has been putting estate planning off because it felt overwhelming, this removes almost every barrier. You can start with the Digital Vault section if that is the most pressing need and build the rest of your plan from there. The important thing is to start before something unexpected happens, not after.

Conclusion

Digital assets are no longer a small footnote in estate planning. For most people under 50, they represent a significant part of their financial and personal life, and they deserve the same attention as a house or a savings account.

The steps are not complicated. Make a list of what you own digitally. Decide what you want to happen to each item. Store that information somewhere secure. And make sure your estate plan gives a trusted person the legal authority to act on those instructions.

If you have been looking for a simple way to do all of this in one place, Beem and GoodTrust make it straightforward. To get started, download and use Beem.

FAQs: How to Add Digital Assets to Your Estate Plan