Your digital life doesn’t die with you. When someone passes away, their family faces a cascade of digital problems that nobody prepared them for: locked accounts, unknown subscriptions still charging, cloud storage full of irreplaceable photos, cryptocurrency wallets with no recovery path, and passwords that protect everything from email to health insurance portals.
Digital estate planning is the process of organizing and protecting access to your digital assets so the right people can manage them when you can’t. In 2026, it’s no longer optional — it’s as important as a will.
What Digital Assets People Forget
Most people think of passwords when they hear “digital estate planning.” But your digital footprint is much larger:
Financial: Bank accounts, investment platforms, cryptocurrency wallets, PayPal, Venmo, payment apps, tax software logins, retirement account portals.
Subscriptions: Streaming services, cloud storage, SaaS tools, domain registrations, hosting accounts, gym memberships, insurance portals. These keep charging after death.
Communication: Email accounts (which are often the key to everything else), social media profiles, messaging apps, contact lists.
Documents: Cloud-stored tax returns, legal documents, medical records, family photos, work files. Google Drive and iCloud accounts can be locked out permanently.
Cryptocurrency: Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other tokens in self-custody wallets, hardware wallets, DeFi protocols, and exchange accounts. These require private keys or seed phrases to access.
Professional: Business accounts, client access, API keys, server credentials, intellectual property stored digitally.
The 5 Steps to a Digital Estate Plan
Step 1: Inventory Everything
Create a comprehensive list of every digital account and asset you have. This is more than you think. Go through your password manager, your email (search for “account created” or “welcome to”), your bank statements (for subscription charges), and your phone apps.
Categories to cover: passwords and logins, financial accounts, crypto wallets, important documents, insurance policies, medical information, legal documents, and subscriptions.
Step 2: Organize by Priority
Not everything is equally urgent. Financial accounts and crypto wallets need immediate attention — money can be lost or stolen. Email accounts are critical because they’re the recovery method for most other accounts. Subscriptions are less urgent but still need to be cancelled to stop charges.
Step 3: Designate Who Gets What
Different people in your life need access to different things. Your spouse needs financial accounts and insurance. Your business partner needs company credentials. Your children might need personal messages and family photos. A trusted tech-savvy friend might need to handle the crypto wallets.
One-size-fits-all access is a security risk. The more people who have access to everything, the more chances for mistakes or misuse.
Step 4: Automate the Transfer
This is where most digital estate plans fail. Writing things down is a start, but paper lists go stale. Passwords change. Accounts get added. The document you printed six months ago is already outdated.
You need a system that:
- Stays current because you interact with it regularly
- Detects when you’re no longer available
- Delivers the right information to the right people automatically
- Works even if you can’t communicate
A dead man’s switch solves this. Regular check-ins keep the system aware you’re active. Stop checking in, and after appropriate warnings and grace periods, the system delivers access to your designated beneficiaries.
Step 5: Verify and Maintain
Test your plan. Make sure your beneficiaries know that they’ve been designated. Give them their emergency card or instructions. Update your inventory when you create new accounts. The best plan is one you actually maintain.
Tools Available
Password managers (1Password, Bitwarden, LastPass) offer emergency access features, but they’re limited. Most grant all-or-nothing access, don’t support video messages, and treat legacy features as an afterthought.
Google Inactive Account Manager lets you share Google account data after inactivity, but only covers Google services. It doesn’t handle non-Google passwords, crypto, or documents stored elsewhere.
Cipherwill is a subscription-based digital will service that stores encrypted information online and delivers it based on inactivity.
DeadSwitch combines an encrypted USB vault with a dead man’s switch. Store everything across 8 categories, assign specific items to specific beneficiaries, and record video goodbye messages. One-time purchase, works offline, open source encryption. See all features and the security model.
Why Automation Beats Documentation
A paper list of passwords in a safe deposit box sounds reasonable. But it fails in practice:
- Passwords change and the list becomes stale
- The list doesn’t include context (which account matters most, what to do with each)
- It requires someone to know the safe deposit box exists and have access to it
- It doesn’t handle two-factor authentication
- It doesn’t include crypto seed phrases with usage instructions
- It can’t deliver video messages
Digital estate planning needs a living system, not a static document. The check-in model ensures that if you’re maintaining the system, it stays current. If you stop maintaining it, that’s exactly the signal that triggers delivery.
Start planning today. Your family will thank you — or more accurately, they won’t have to scramble during the worst week of their lives.
Get started with DeadSwitch or read the FAQ for more details.