Digital assets and planning

Recommended: The Care and Preservation of Your Digital Assets, a three-part series posted at the Los Angeles Estate Planning Attorneys weblog. This is an area that needs more attention from many of us.

Planning for "virtual" assets

In the Fall of 2009, we published an issue of our Personal Planning newsletter entitled Death, Disability and the Online World (PDF), in which we made a number of recommendations and suggestions on the issue of dealing with online assets - e-mail accounts, weblogs, and the individual's presence on any of the expanding number of social media sites.

We ended with this:

"These. . . death and disability issues begin to arise when they were not previously anticipated. As time goes on, we can anticipate that online communities and document custodians will come to add new provisions to deal with the online property of deceased or disabled owners. Facebook’s new initiative is a start, but there are still several needs left unaddressed."

More and similar:
PINs that Needle Families - Wall Street Journal - 7-23-11

South Florida Estate Planning - 7-27-11 - includes materials from his presentation

Five Reasons Digital Estate Planning Has Not Caught On. . . Yet - 7-30-11
Ghost in the Machine: Managing the Information Afterlife - 8-24-11