The average American adult has 90 to 100 online accounts. They have email addresses, social media profiles, streaming subscriptions, banking apps, investment platforms, cloud storage services, e-commerce accounts, healthcare portals, professional networks, and dozens of other digital relationships scattered across the internet. Most of them will matter to someone when the account holder dies — and most of them are entirely invisible to the family members who will need to deal with them.
Digital estate planning — the process of organizing, documenting, and preparing your digital life for the people who come after you — has become one of the most urgent and most overlooked areas of personal legacy work. This checklist won't take care of everything in a single afternoon, but working through it will give you a significantly more organized digital estate than most people leave behind.
Step 1: Inventory Your Accounts
The first and foundational step is making a list of the digital accounts you have. This is harder than it sounds because most people genuinely do not know how many accounts they have or what they are.
A practical method: spend twenty minutes reviewing your email inbox, filtering for "welcome," "account," "verify," and "subscription" to surface every account you've ever created. Review your password manager if you use one. Go through your phone's apps one by one and note which ones represent active accounts. Check your bank and credit card statements for recurring charges that indicate active subscriptions.
Your inventory doesn't need to be exhaustive on day one. Even a partial inventory of your most important accounts — banking, investment, email, social media, cloud storage — is dramatically more useful than no inventory at all.
Step 2: Set Up Apple Legacy Contact
If you use an iPhone or other Apple devices, setting up Apple's Legacy Contact feature should be one of your first actions. Go to Settings, tap your name, then Sign-In & Security, then Legacy Contact. Designate at least one person who can access your iCloud Photos, documents, contacts, and email after your death. Share the generated access key with them directly or store it with your estate documents.
This five-minute task protects years of photos and documents that have no other access path for your family.
Step 3: Configure Google Inactive Account Manager
If you use Gmail, Google Photos, Google Drive, or YouTube, configure Google's Inactive Account Manager at myaccount.google.com. Designate trusted contacts, specify what data each person can access, and set the inactivity period that triggers your plan.
Google's Inactive Account Manager is one of the most thoughtfully designed digital legacy tools available. Using it costs nothing and requires only a few minutes of setup.
A 2024 survey by the Digital Estate Planning Association found that fewer than 8% of adults had configured either Apple Legacy Contact or Google Inactive Account Manager — despite the fact that these platforms hold some of the most irreplaceable digital content in most people's lives.
Step 4: Set Facebook Legacy Contact
Facebook allows you to designate a Legacy Contact — a person who can manage your memorialized profile after your death. They can write a pinned post, respond to friend requests, and update your profile picture. They cannot read your messages or remove content you posted.
To set this up, go to Facebook Settings, then "Memorialization Settings," and designate your Legacy Contact. You can also use this page to request account deletion rather than memorialization if you prefer.
Step 5: Enable Two-Factor Recovery Options
Two-factor authentication protects your accounts from unauthorized access while you're alive. But after death, it can prevent your family from accessing accounts that require a code sent to your phone — which may no longer be operational.
Review your most important accounts and ensure that recovery options are documented. Where possible, set up backup recovery codes (many services generate these) and store them with your estate documents. For accounts that use an authenticator app, document which app you use and the accounts associated with it.
Step 6: Choose a Password Storage Strategy
Your executor or family members will eventually need to access your accounts to cancel subscriptions, retrieve financial information, and manage your digital estate. They can't do this without passwords.
The most secure approach is to use a password manager (1Password, Bitwarden, Dashlane) and to document for your executor: which password manager you use, the email address associated with it, and how to access your emergency kit or master password. Many password managers have an emergency access feature that allows a designated person to request access after a waiting period.
Do not leave a list of passwords in plain text anywhere that could be compromised. The goal is not to hand someone all your passwords today, but to ensure they have a path to them when legitimately needed.
Step 7: Document Your Financial Accounts
Create a document listing all of your financial accounts: checking and savings accounts, investment accounts, retirement accounts, cryptocurrency wallets, loans, credit cards, and PayPal/Venmo/Cash App balances. Include the institution name, approximate balance or account type, and any relevant notes for your executor.
This document should be stored securely — not in plain text on your desktop, but in an encrypted document system or physical secure storage. Review it annually.
Step 8: Update Beneficiary Designations
Beneficiary designations on retirement accounts (401k, IRA), life insurance policies, and payable-on-death bank accounts override your will. Review all of them annually — particularly after any major life change such as marriage, divorce, birth of a child, or death of a named beneficiary.
An outdated beneficiary designation is one of the most common and most preventable causes of estate complications. Updating these designations requires only a form submission to the account provider.
Step 9: Manage Your Subscriptions
Create a list of all recurring subscriptions: streaming services, software subscriptions, news and magazine subscriptions, cloud storage, gym memberships, and any other service billed automatically. Include the service name, billing amount, billing frequency, and which card it charges.
This list serves two purposes: it helps you identify subscriptions you no longer want (and might cancel now), and it gives your executor a complete picture of recurring charges that need to be canceled after your death.
Step 10: Address Your Social Media Accounts
Decide — and document — what you want to happen to each social media account after your death. Options typically include memorialization, deletion, and in some cases, continued management by a designated person.
For platforms with formal legacy options (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok), configure those settings in your account settings. For platforms without formal options, note your preferences in your digital estate plan so your executor has guidance.
According to one projection, Facebook may have more dead users than living ones within the next 50 years. The question of what happens to social media after death is increasingly part of mainstream legacy planning conversations.
Step 11: Back Up Irreplaceable Content
Even with the best digital estate planning, data can be lost. Hard drives fail, platforms shut down, and cloud services change their policies. The most important digital content in your life — photos, videos, creative work, personal writing — should exist in multiple locations.
Implement a regular backup practice: at minimum, keep important content in one cloud service and one local backup (external hard drive). For content that is truly irreplaceable, consider a third backup in a different cloud service or stored in a different physical location.
Step 12: Leave Instructions for Your Executor
After completing the above steps, write a brief document — two to four pages — that serves as a guide for your executor or trusted family member. This document should explain where to find your account inventory, how to access your password manager, what you want to happen to each major platform, and any specific wishes about digital content.
This document, stored with your other estate documents, transforms a confusing and time-consuming process into a manageable task. It is the final and perhaps most important step in your digital estate plan — not because it does the work, but because it tells the people you love exactly what to do.
None of these steps is technically complex. None requires hiring a professional. The only requirement is setting aside the time — a few hours spread across a week or two — to work through them thoughtfully. The family members who eventually benefit from your preparation will never know how much confusion you've spared them. That is exactly as it should be.
My Loved Ones guides you through every step of digital estate planning in a single, secure platform — from account documentation to legacy messages to beneficiary instructions.
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