When was the last time you took inventory of your online profiles?
Do you have hundreds or thousands of emails lurking on servers somewhere? Do you have a Facebook profile page or a Twitter account? What about Flickr or Google Plus, or LinkedIn? Do you have a website or a blog? Do you invest online? What about your bank account and passwords?
Have you thought about what will happen to all of this ‘stuff’ if something were to happen to you?
Creating a ‘digital will’ can list all of the important sites, user ID’s and everything else digital that matters to you. It can offer your family the keys to your online business and your plans for it, or blogs not yet posted or sites and passwords to sort through or delete
Create a list, at the very least, of all of your online assets, such as investment account ID’s and bank account access information, as well as access to contact lists and other important information. Then keep it in a safe place so that if something should happen unexpectedly, your family will be able to contact friends, access money, and close or manage your investment accounts.
The best place to include these instructions is to just add them to your existing Living Will or Trust. This can be an amendment, and through legal representatives, it will be certain to fall into the right hands. Your legal representative can be your executor, or you can name one or two others, to handle all of your online accounts after you’re gone, and to follow your wishes.
There are also encrypted on-line services available where you can keep and update all this information and then it’s simple to just include the password to this site rather than updating your Living Will over and over.
For more information on the steps to take to create a Digital Will, please contact Paul Spelliscy at paul.spelliscy@variety.bc.ca or Peter Chipman at peter.chipman@variety.bc.ca and they will provide you with a list of some of the important steps to take.
