Digital assets in your estate plan

Michigan has adopted the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act. It sets an order of priority: an online tool provided by the platform; Google's Inactive Account Manager, Apple's Legacy Contact, Facebook's legacy contact; beats everything else. If you have not used one, your will, trust or power of attorney controls, provided it grants the authority explicitly. If neither exists, the provider's terms of service decide, and those terms are usually a locked door.

What counts as a digital asset

• Sentimental. Photo libraries, videos, email archives, social media, cloud storage.
• Financial. Online-only bank and brokerage accounts, PayPal and Venmo balances, cryptocurrency, credit card and airline points.
• Income-producing. A domain name, an online store, a YouTube or newsletter following, app or book royalties, client databases.
• Operational. The email account that receives every password reset, two-factor apps, password managers, the phone number those codes go to.
• Subscriptions. Recurring charges that quietly continue for years after a death.

Four steps to take

1. Inventory, without writing down passwords

List the accounts, what is in them, and what you want done with each; preserve, transfer, or delete. Keep the list somewhere your trusted people can find it, and keep the credentials in a password manager rather than in the document itself. A list of passwords in a will becomes a public court record.

2. Use the platforms' own tools

These override your documents, so set them first: Apple Legacy Contact, Google Inactive Account Manager, Facebook legacy contact or deletion setting, and whatever equivalent your password manager offers for emergency access. This takes an evening and solves most of the practical problem.

3. Grant explicit authority in the documents

Your will, trust and financial power of attorney should each expressly authorize your fiduciary to access, manage, transfer and delete digital assets, including the content of electronic communications. That last phrase matters: without specific consent, providers withhold the contents of emails and messages even from a court-appointed representative. Older documents almost never contain this language.

4. Decide who, and say what you want

The person best suited to settle your estate may not be the one you want reading fifteen years of email. You can name a different person for digital matters, restrict access to categories, or direct that certain accounts simply be closed unread.

Cryptocurrency deserves its own paragraph

Crypto held in a self-custody wallet is gone forever if the seed phrase is lost; no court order recovers it. It is also the asset most often overlooked, because there is no statement in the mail to alert anyone it existed. Record that it exists and where the recovery information is held, store the seed phrase securely and separately (never in the will), and make sure your successor understands it is theirs to safeguard, not to post into a website. Exchange-held crypto is easier: the exchange has an estate process, and your fiduciary needs the authority language above.

For business owners and creators

• the domain registrar and hosting account; a lapsed renewal can take a business offline permanently;
• payment processors, invoicing and payroll logins;
• customer lists and the email platform that holds them;
• content channels producing royalties or ad income, which are inheritable assets;
• who can reach all of it during a period of incapacity, not just after death.

Fold it into the rest of your plan

Digital access belongs alongside the standard documents, not in a separate project. If your plan predates about 2016, the digital provisions are very likely missing; see when to update your estate plan.

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This article is general information about Michigan law, not legal advice, and does not create an attorney-client relationship. Platform policies change frequently.