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Digital assets should be included in an estate
Author: Scarinci Hollenbeck, LLC
Date: May 2, 2014
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When most people are planning their estates, they typically focus on tangible and financial assets, like real estate, capital holdings and bank accounts. In the modern age, however, it is also important to consider digital assets. North American respondents to a McAfee survey valued their digital assets at an average of $54,722 – a sizeable sum. These assets included downloaded music, email accounts, photos, health records, contacts and creative projects, among others.
According to Fox Business, it can be extremely difficult to find, and subsequently gain access to, the digital assets of a deceased person. As we conduct more of our business and personal interactions online, it is becoming more important to consider how beneficiaries can gain access to accounts and assets that they hold after death.
In the past, when we did more business on paper, there were clues around the house as to the accounts that a deceased individual held, what that person may have owned and what he or she owed, the news source explained. Now, much of that information is digital, which can be an issue, as much of that digital information can be difficult to access. If a deceased person held a large sum of money in a bank account, for example, but failed to inform his or her beneficiaries, they might never find out about that asset.
One issue that beneficiaries can also face is the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, according to USA Today. This law prohibits unauthorized computer access, and doesn’t technically specify between hackers and heirs. The Uniform Law Commission, a Chicago-based nonprofit that works for uniformity of state laws, is working to address this problem. The Commission is drafting a law for proposal that would give fiduciaries the authority to access, manage, distribute, copy or delete digital assets.
As we hold increasingly more digital assets going forward as a society, the importance of considering digital assets in estate planning is likely to only become more pressing.
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