Digital Assets and Your Will

Once a grant of probate has been issued, a will becomes a public document that anyone can obtain a copy of from the Probate Registry for a small fee. This is a well established part of the probate system, designed to bring transparency to how estates are administered, but it also means that anything written into a will is no longer private in any meaningful sense.

For this reason, a will should never include passwords, PINs, recovery codes, or cryptocurrency private keys or seed phrases. Doing so would effectively publish sensitive security information to anyone who requests a copy of the will after probate, potentially long after the original need for that information has passed and while the accounts or funds behind it may still be live and vulnerable.

A will can and should appoint clear executors with general authority to deal with the whole of the estate, including digital assets, even though it will not spell out the detail of every account. Where a digital asset has genuine transferable value, such as a domain name, an online business, or a cryptocurrency holding, the will can identify that asset in general terms and direct who should benefit from its value, in the same way it would deal with any other valuable possession.

It is generally unnecessary and unwise to try to list every social media account, streaming subscription, or minor online account by name in a will, both because these accounts usually cannot be transferred as property and because such a list would quickly become outdated as accounts change. The will's job is to give executors the authority to deal with the estate broadly, not to serve as an inventory of everything owned.

The practical solution used by most people who take their digital estate seriously is to keep a separate, securely stored record of accounts and access details, entirely apart from the will. This might take the form of a password manager with a master password known to a trusted person, or a written letter of wishes kept in a safe place such as a safe or with a solicitor, updated periodically as accounts change.

This record can be as detailed as needed, since it is not a public document in the way a will becomes. It can note which accounts exist, roughly what they contain, and any specific wishes about what should happen to them, such as whether a social media profile should be memorialised or deleted, without exposing that information to anyone who is not meant to see it.

Even where an account cannot be inherited, an executor still needs to know it exists in order to deal with it properly, whether that means claiming a balance, cancelling a subscription, or requesting that a social media account be memorialised. Executors cannot act on accounts they do not know about, and unclaimed value or ongoing subscription charges can otherwise go unnoticed for a long time.

It helps enormously to let your named executor know, in general terms, that a secure record exists and roughly where to find it, without necessarily sharing its full contents while you are alive. This gives them a clear starting point without compromising security in the meantime.

Digital accounts change far more often than physical possessions, with new services signed up to and old ones abandoned on a fairly regular basis. It is worth reviewing your secure digital record periodically, in the same way you might review a will after a significant life event, so that it reflects your current accounts rather than ones you no longer use.

My Posh Will's guided online service includes an estate record where you can note down accounts and where important papers are kept, alongside a straightforward will covering England and Wales, at a one-off cost of £69 for a single will or £89 for mirror wills, with lifetime access so you can return and update your details whenever your circumstances change.