When someone dies, families used to face a fairly predictable set of tasks.
Notify the bank. Collect the mail. Go through the filing cabinet for the insurance papers and the deed to the house.
Every one of those tasks still applies, but they are no longer close to the whole job.
Now there is also a phone that needs getting into, an email account holding the last messages someone ever sent, a cloud photo library nobody remembers the password to, and a handful of streaming subscriptions quietly charging a card every month for a service nobody uses anymore.
This is the part of estate planning that most wills and most family conversations still leave out entirely.
A digital estate planning checklist is how you close that gap, and it does not take a lawyer or a lost weekend to put one together.
Why a Will Alone Does Not Cover Your Digital Life
A traditional will was designed around property you can point to. A house, a car, a bank account, a piece of jewelry.
Digital accounts do not fit that model cleanly, because in most cases you do not actually own the account itself. You own a license to use it, governed by a terms of service agreement you clicked through years ago and never read again.
That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should.
Sharing your password with a family member, even a spouse, can technically violate a platform's terms of service, and some companies have historically refused to hand over account access to a next of kin without a court order, even with a death certificate in hand.
The bigger tech companies have gotten better about this over the past decade.
Google has a feature called Inactive Account Manager that lets you decide in advance what happens to your data if your account goes quiet for a set period of time. Apple introduced a Legacy Contact feature that lets a chosen person access photos, files, and messages after your death. Facebook and Instagram allow accounts to be memorialized or, if you prefer, deleted entirely, based on instructions you set ahead of time.
These tools are useful, but they only work if you actually set them up before you need them, and they only cover the platform that built them. Nobody has built one universal tool that covers your entire digital life at once.
That is exactly the gap a personal checklist is meant to fill.
Building Your Digital Estate Planning Checklist Category By Category
The easiest way to build this checklist is to work through your digital life one category at a time rather than trying to remember everything at once. Most people are surprised by how many accounts they actually have once they start listing them out.
Cloud Storage and Photos
This is usually the category people care about most, and understandably so. Your Google Photos library, your iCloud storage, your Dropbox folder, and any backup service you use hold years of pictures, videos, and documents that may not exist anywhere else.
List each service, the account it is tied to, and what you want to happen to the content. Some families want everything downloaded and transferred to a shared family drive. Others are fine leaving it in place as long as someone has the login.
Either way, write it down, because a photo library nobody can access might as well not exist.
Subscriptions and Recurring Charges
Streaming services, meal kits, software subscriptions, gym memberships tied to an app, and cloud storage plans all bill automatically until someone actively cancels them.
Without a list, these charges can keep hitting a credit card for months after someone has passed away, which adds a small but real financial burden on top of an already difficult time.
Write down the service name, roughly what it costs, and which card it bills to, so your executor can cancel each one without having to comb through months of bank statements first.
Financial and Financial Adjacent Logins
Online banking, investment accounts, PayPal, Venmo, cryptocurrency exchanges, and tax software all fall into this category, and they deserve extra care.
For traditional financial accounts, your executor will generally need to go through the institution directly with a death certificate and letters of administration rather than simply logging in, so the goal here is less about granting login access and more about making sure your executor knows these accounts exist in the first place.
Cryptocurrency is the one major exception worth calling out on its own. If your crypto lives in a wallet you control rather than an exchange, the private key or seed phrase is the only way in, and there is no customer support line to call if it is lost. If you hold any crypto outside of an exchange, make sure your instructions clearly explain where that seed phrase is stored, without writing the phrase itself directly into a shared spreadsheet.
Domains and Websites You Own
If you own a personal website, a small business site, or even just a domain name you have been sitting on, list the registrar it is purchased through and when the renewal date falls.
Domains lapse automatically if a renewal payment fails, and once a domain expires it can be purchased by anyone else within a matter of weeks. If that domain matters to your family or represents years of work on a business, this is one of the easier things to lose permanently through simple neglect.
Social Media and Communication Accounts
Email, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and any messaging app you use regularly all belong on the list, along with your general preference for what should happen to each one.
Some people want their accounts memorialized so friends can still visit the page. Others would rather everything be deleted quietly. There is no wrong answer here, but it should be your answer, written down, rather than a decision your family has to guess at while grieving.
Work, Professional, and Loyalty Accounts
This last category tends to get forgotten, but it can matter more than people expect.
Airline miles, hotel points, and other loyalty programs sometimes allow points to be transferred to a family member if the program is notified within a set window. Professional accounts like a LinkedIn profile, a portfolio site, or software licenses tied to freelance work may also need specific handling, especially if there is unfinished client work involved.
How To Store This Information Safely
Once this list exists, it becomes one of the most sensitive documents in your entire estate plan, so it deserves to be treated that way.
Do not email it as an attachment, and do not drop it into an unprotected shared folder where anyone with the link can open it.
A password manager such as 1Password, Bitwarden, or LastPass is generally the strongest option for the passwords themselves, since most of them include a built in emergency access or legacy contact feature that releases your vault to a chosen person only when needed.
For the checklist itself, an encrypted folder, a password protected document, or a printed copy stored alongside your will in a safe or safe deposit box all work well. The goal is simple. Anyone who should not have this information cannot get to it, and the one or two people who need it know exactly where to look.
Choosing a Digital Executor
Your digital executor does not have to be the same person named as the executor of your will, though it often is. What matters more is that this person is comfortable with technology and that you trust them completely.
In the United States, most states have adopted some version of the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, often shortened to RUFADAA, which gives a named fiduciary a legal path to access certain digital accounts under specific conditions. The details vary by state and the law does not automatically override every platform's own terms of service, so this checklist works alongside your legal documents rather than replacing them.
This part of the process is genuinely worth a short conversation with an estate planning attorney, since laws around digital assets are still relatively new and continue to be updated. This guide is meant to help you organize the information, not to serve as legal advice.
Download the Digital Estate Planning Checklist Template
To make this easier to actually start, we put together a free spreadsheet template you can download and fill in at your own pace.
It includes a tab with full instructions and a security note, along with a checklist tab pre-organized into the categories covered in this post, from cloud storage and subscriptions to financial logins, domains, social media, work accounts, and loyalty programs. An example row shows you exactly how to fill in your own information.
You can grab the template below and start with whichever category feels most urgent to you.
Keeping the Checklist Updated
A digital estate planning checklist is not a one time project. New accounts get created, old ones get abandoned, and passwords change more often than most of us would like to admit.
Set a reminder to review it once or twice a year, maybe alongside a birthday or the start of a new year, so it stays accurate instead of quietly going stale the way so many good intentions do.
A password nobody wrote down is a door that closes forever, along with everything behind it. A few hours spent on a spreadsheet is a small price to make sure that door stays open for the people you leave it to.
Organizing the accounts and the access is the practical half of what you leave behind. The other half is the part no checklist can capture, which is the actual story of who you were and why any of it mattered in the first place.
That is the piece Memoracy was built for, one daily prompt at a time, so your family inherits more than just your passwords.
Sign up and start your first story on Memoracy today.
