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Guide · Digital legacy

Digital estate planning: what your family will actually need

A will decides who inherits. It does not tell anyone where anything is kept, and it will not unlock a phone. This is a practical guide to the second half of the job.

What digital estate planning actually means

Traditional estate planning answers one question: who gets what. It is a legal instrument, drafted by a solicitor or attorney, and it works.

What it does not do is act as a map. A will can say "my investments pass to my daughter" without anyone knowing which brokerage holds them. It can transfer a house without recording where the deed is filed. And it cannot help at all with the thing most families get stuck on first — a phone nobody can unlock.

Digital estate planning is the practical layer underneath: a record of what exists, where it lives, and what someone would need in order to reach it.

What your family will actually be looking for

When people describe going through this, the same items come up. Not the dramatic ones — the ordinary ones nobody wrote down.

• Accounts that hold money. Current accounts, savings, brokerage, pensions, premium bonds, an old employer's share scheme.
• Recurring payments. Direct debits and subscriptions that keep drawing from an account nobody is watching.
• Insurance. Life, home, contents, health, travel. Policies are worthless if no one knows they exist.
• Property. Deeds, mortgage details, freehold or leasehold paperwork, the name of the conveyancer.
• Crypto. Which wallets, which exchanges, and where recovery information is kept.
• Access. Device passcodes, the primary email account, and any two-factor method that guards the rest.
• Obligations. Loans, guarantees, a business account, an outstanding tax matter.
• People. The accountant, the solicitor, the financial adviser, the friend who helped set up the network drive.

The four things that make this hard

1. Two-factor authentication guards everything else

Modern security is designed to stop anyone who is not you. That is the point, and it works in both directions. A code sent to a phone your family cannot unlock protects the account from a thief and from your executor equally.

2. Encryption has no back door by design

An encrypted drive, an encrypted vault, an encrypted backup — none of these have a customer-service override. This applies to CofferShield too, and we say so on our security page: forget the master password and the vault is gone. That property is what makes encryption worth using. It is also why the password has to be recorded somewhere physical and safe.

3. Terms of service often outrank your wishes

Many online accounts are non-transferable by contract. An executor may have a legal right to the value in an account without having any right to log into it. Platform-specific legacy tools exist — Apple's Legacy Contact, Google's Inactive Account Manager, Facebook's memorialisation — and they are worth setting up, but each covers only its own platform.

4. Nobody knows the list is incomplete

This is the quiet one. A family can work through everything they know about and still miss an account they were never told about. There is no notification when something is forgotten.

Where to write it down

Every option here is a real trade-off. None of them is obviously correct for everyone.

Approach	Strength	Weakness
Paper in a safe	No technology to fail; survives you by default	Goes stale quickly; one fire or flood from gone; readable by anyone who opens the safe
Cloud password manager	Always current; some offer emergency access	Covers logins well, other records poorly; your data sits on a company's servers
With your solicitor	Legally robust; professional custody	Slow to update; usually cannot hold live credentials; ongoing cost
Encrypted vault on your own machine	Holds records, documents and instructions together; nothing held by a company	You are responsible for backups, and for making sure someone can eventually open it

Most people end up using two: something digital that stays current, and something physical that records how to open it.

A practical order to do this in

1. Start with access, not assets. Device passcode and primary email first. Almost every recovery path runs through that inbox.
2. List what exists before you organise it. Names of institutions only. No balances, no logins. An hour of listing beats a month of intending to.
3. Add locations. Where the deed is, which drawer the policy is in, which exchange holds the crypto.
4. Write the instructions. Short and plain: who to call first, what to do about the business, what you would like to happen to your photographs.
5. Decide who is told, and when. A record no one knows about is a record that will not be found.
6. Set a date to review it. Once a year is enough for most people. Put it next to a birthday so it actually happens.

The test worth applying

Pick the person who would have to sort things out. Ask yourself honestly: if you could not explain anything tomorrow, how far would they get on their own, and where exactly would they stop?

Wherever the answer is "they would have no idea" — that is the first thing to write down.