Your Online Life Does Not Disappear When You Do
When someone dies, their family must deal with far more than a house, a bank account, and a pension. The average UK adult now has over 100 online accounts — from email and social media to streaming services, cloud storage, cryptocurrency wallets, and digital subscriptions. Yet fewer than 15 per cent of Wills make any reference to digital assets.
The result is predictable: grieving families locked out of email accounts that hold critical financial correspondence, cryptocurrency worth tens of thousands of pounds trapped behind passwords nobody knows, and direct debits running for months on forgotten subscriptions.
What Counts as a Digital Asset?
Digital assets fall into several categories, and each presents different challenges:
Financial digital assets — online bank accounts, investment platforms, cryptocurrency holdings, PayPal balances, and premium bonds held digitally. These have clear monetary value and form part of your estate for inheritance tax purposes.
Communication accounts — email, messaging apps, and social media. These may not have direct financial value but often contain vital information: correspondence with solicitors, accountants, and financial advisers; password reset links for other accounts; and digital receipts for assets your family may not know about.
Subscription services — streaming platforms, software licences, cloud storage, domain names, and website hosting. Many of these auto-renew by direct debit or credit card and will continue charging indefinitely unless cancelled.
Digital media and intellectual property — photos stored in the cloud, eBooks, music libraries, and any content you have created online including blogs, YouTube channels, or social media content with advertising revenue.
Cryptocurrency and digital wallets — Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other digital currencies held in wallets secured by private keys. If nobody has the key, the funds are effectively lost forever. There is no bank to call and no password reset option.
The Legal Position in the UK
UK law has not kept pace with digital life. There is currently no specific legislation governing digital assets after death. The general position is:
- Financial digital assets (money, investments, crypto) form part of your estate and pass according to your Will or intestacy rules
- However, many online accounts are governed by terms of service that restrict transfer — you may own the money in a PayPal account, but PayPal’s terms may not allow your executors to simply log in
- Some platforms (notably Apple and Google) have built-in legacy contact features that allow you to nominate someone to access your account after death
- Others (Facebook, Instagram) allow memorialisation of accounts but give limited access to content
The practical reality is that without proper planning, your executors will spend weeks or months navigating customer service processes — often requiring death certificates, grants of probate, and lengthy correspondence — to access each account individually.
Cryptocurrency — The Highest-Risk Digital Asset
Cryptocurrency presents the most acute risk. Unlike a bank account, there is no institution holding your funds. Your crypto exists on a blockchain, secured by a private key — a string of characters that functions as the only password. If that key is lost, the cryptocurrency is permanently inaccessible.
Industry estimates suggest that approximately 20 per cent of all Bitcoin ever mined — worth hundreds of billions of pounds — is locked in wallets whose owners have died or lost their keys.
If you hold any cryptocurrency, your estate plan must include:
- A record of which currencies you hold and on which platforms or wallets
- Secure storage of private keys and seed phrases (the recovery words used to regenerate a key)
- Clear instructions for your executors on how to access and transfer the holdings
- Consideration of whether a hardware wallet should be stored in a safe deposit box with access instructions in your Will
Do not store private keys or seed phrases in your Will itself — Wills become public documents after probate. Instead, reference the location of the information in your Will: “My cryptocurrency access information is stored in [location], to be accessed by my executors.”
Building a Digital Asset Register
The single most important step you can take is creating a digital asset register — a comprehensive list of every online account, login, and digital asset you own. This should include:
- Account name and website URL
- Username or email address used to register
- Whether two-factor authentication is enabled (and which device or app provides the second factor)
- Approximate value (for financial accounts)
- What you want to happen to the account (close, transfer, memorialise)
Store this register securely — a password manager with a master password shared with your executor, an encrypted document on a USB drive kept with your Will, or a secure digital vault service designed for this purpose.
Update it at least once a year. The average person creates three to four new online accounts every month, so your register will become outdated quickly if neglected.
Practical Steps for Your Executors
Make your executors’ lives easier by taking these steps now:
- Use a password manager and share the master password securely with a trusted person
- Enable legacy contacts on Apple, Google, and Facebook where available
- List all financial platforms — bank apps, investment accounts, crypto exchanges
- Document subscriptions — a quick check of your direct debits and credit card statements will reveal most of them
- Include digital assets in your Will — not the passwords themselves, but a clause directing your executors to your digital asset register
- Review annually — add this to your estate planning review checklist
What Happens If You Do Nothing
Without a digital asset plan, your family faces months of frustration, potential financial loss from inaccessible crypto or investment accounts, and ongoing charges from subscriptions nobody knows how to cancel. In the worst cases, valuable digital assets are lost permanently.
Your digital life is now as significant as your physical estate. It deserves the same level of planning.