by John Berry, CEO and co-founder of OneSecurePlan, Inc.

We have all at one time or another heard Benjamin Franklin’s famous quote – “In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes”. While I can’t help you with your taxes, I can certainly suggest a plan to ensure you are better prepared for your demise, especially as relates to your digital estate.

While digital estate planning is certainly not as sexy a subject as, well almost any other technology issue, it’s highly important and gets personal for most of us very quickly.

Consider this scenario: If you were to suddenly pass away or become incapacitated, how confident are you that your loved ones would be able to easily find and access your digital property?  Experience tells us that many would never find or be able to access a lot of our accounts, leaving digital assets abandoned and lost.

Even in cases where our digital property assets are known, not having a plan for authorization and management leaves family members and fiduciaries facing many challenges. Today the vast majority of our financial, insurance, and other important personal documents are in digital format, saved in a variety of online systems, secured by numerous passwords, multi-factor authentication and other security options. The problem is no matter how organized we think we are, or how familiar with technology we may be, without clear instructions, most of us will end up leaving a digital mess for others to sort out when we pass.

Digital assets defined

Digital assets, also referred to as digital property, can be divided into two categories. Those with monetary value and those without. Just because an asset doesn’t have any monetary value doesn’t mean it doesn’t hold sentimental value, especially to those we will leave behind.

Apart from all our online banking, retirement and other financial accounts, digital property assets with monetary value could include the following and more:

• Data stored digitally either in online or off-line storage devices and/ or personal computing, tablets or smart phones.
• Digital payment provider accounts that may hold cash balances or credits.
• Customer loyalty rewards accounts including airline miles, hotel rewards, store rewards and other similar services.
• Digital assets with intellectual property value such as computer programs, copyrighted and trade marked digital materials, literary works, etc.
• Affiliate accounts, revenue producing websites and blogs, domain names of value.
• Cryptocurrencies and tokens.

Digital property assets without monetary but with sentimental value could include any of the following:

• Online accounts including social media, email, photo and video sharing, gaming accounts, files stored in cloud and online storage and other personal online accounts.
• Personal blogs and websites.

A roadmap to no-where

Many estate plans – wills & trusts – don’t address digital assets leaving users to improvise with lists of assets and login credentials in spreadsheets or saved to cloud storage service. The downside of all these solutions is we end up leaving a half completed roadmap hoping our executor and loved ones will somehow be able to find and follow the path in their hunt for our digital assets.

This is hardly a satisfactory solution. Spreadsheets and other lists stored on your personal computing devices are open to being lost or corrupted. They also don’t prevent access before you die and most don’t have even basic password access.

Likewise general cloud storage solutions are not designed to limit access and provide security for sensitive data such as user access credentials and passwords to online accounts.

Even if we have an organized system, how do we ensure only those we want to have access to our data, get access and only when we want them to and not before?

Designing a better mousetrap

The ideal solution to recording, storing and providing secure access to your digital estate should include all of the following.

• High data and access security
• Configurable and granular access control with the ability to i) Only allow named individuals access, ii) add and remove named individual access rights at any time, iii) limit access to when the grantor is alive, deceased or incapacitated, iv) limit access to “view only” or fully editable “read, write” access and v) limit access to certain documents only.
• Provide redundancy
• Be accessible for any device

If your digital data store doesn’t as a minimum provide all of the above, it’s probably not the solution you should trust the storage of your digital estate to.

OneSecurePlan

Introducing OneSecurePlan (www.OneSecurePlan.com) the most secure and effective way to ensure your loved ones left behind will know your wishes and where all your assets – both digital and physical – are kept. With options to invite trusted fiduciaries – spouse, relatives, financial advisor, attorney, etc. – you get to control who has access to what documents, when they have access and how – edit or view only. OneSecurePlan helps you to ensure everything is in place for your loved ones when they need it most

About John:

John Berry is CEO and co-founder of OneSecurePlan, Inc. He has spent the last 30 years working for and consulting to technology vendors and start-ups.  As a technology author he blogs, writes and speaks about cybersecurity, privacy and cryptocurrency technologies with a focus on FinTech solutions.

Disclosure: Corniche Growth Advisors is a shareholder and advisor to OneSecurePlan.