Your Loved Ones Will Inherit a Lot From You—Including Your Facebook

On this episode of The Long View, author Sally Balch Hurme discusses lessons she learned caring for her loved ones, the importance of getting organized as your loved ones age, and the best practices for having financial, legal, and personal affairs in order.

Here are a few excerpts from Garrett and Mullaney’s conversation with Morningstar’s Amy Arnott and Ben Johnson.

How to Get Your Digital Affairs in Order

Johnson: Sally, I’m curious if you have any recommendations for folks who are considering how best to make sure that, call it, their digital affairs are in order. That could span everything from digital assets, things like cryptocurrencies, to, I’ve got a number of family members myself who have Facebook pages that are effectively now a form of digital tombstone for them. How do we make sure that we’ve got everything covered with respect to all our various digital affairs these days?

Hurme: This is a big mess, and there really is no easy solution. And you probably could have a whole hour just on all of the issues surrounding digital assets and the various ways you can protect them and then make them accessible. Almost every online account may have different protections or protocols. There are good reasons why this is such a mess, I guess, because there are federal and state privacy laws and computer fraud laws that do make it very difficult, for your own safety and security and privacy, for anyone else to get access to what are now myriads of different kinds of things online that are protected in one way or another. Most digital providers are prohibited from disclosing most account information, including passwords, to anyone without the holder’s consent, and if the holder no longer has capacity or is deceased, what do you do?

I have three simple steps that have very lengthy explanations, but let me just do a top line. First of all, have a secure list of all of your online accounts—whether it’s Twitter, Facebook, Google, your bank accounts, your Google Drive, or even your bitcoin, or your Netflix. Make a list of all of those things that are online that are password-protected. List each account and those passwords and any login instructions so that your family at least know where to start and how to possibly get access to that information, whether it’s a renewal, billing, bank account statements, or your retirement account statements, whatever. It’s a maze out there.

And then, the next important thing to do is to designate someone, through a specific power of attorney, that specifically says that this person you have selected can access your accounts. Should you die, your agent will then use that document to show to all of the various online account providers and platforms to which you have given consent to access your accounts. A regular power of attorney probably will not be sufficient. Your power of attorney needs to specifically say you have access to my online accounts. And this could be someone different from the person that you have as your financial power of attorney. In my case, I probably would make it my grandson who would know how to get along better on the internet than I do.

And then be proactive and check with each of those accounts about what their protocols might be for gaining access. For example, I know that Facebook, Google, and Apple currently allow you to designate what they call a “legacy contact,” who can manage your account after you die. You’ll need to dig into the interstices of those accounts to find out how to designate a legacy contact, but be proactive, particularly with the accounts that you most frequently use, where you have the most significant financial and personal information stored, and see what you can do to make sure that you are leaving access to your executor or your financial power of attorney to be able to access these accounts after your death.