Trigger warning, this blog post is a little dark and talks about death and what happens to your digital stuff after you are gone.
One of my clients sadly died recently. Invoices were going unpaid, emails were being bounced. I only learned about his passing when an obituary was placed on the site I was maintaining for him. I’m guessing no-one knew I maintained his site for him.
This has caused some introspection on my part, and has made me ask the question, what will happen to my digital estate when I finally die?
The answer was a little bit worrying, my wife doesn’t know details of my Stripe account, she doesn’t know who my customers are or what I do for them. She doesn’t have any contact details for my team and how to keep the recurring income from my maintenance plans moving forward. This could be a valuable passive income stream for her and my kids.
I have a feeling that my digital assets will just wither away or even be a liability (services being paid for but not delivered).
What can I do to make sure these assets are passed to her via my digital estate.
First of all, let’s define what an estate is:
Everything owned by a person who has died is known as their estate. The estate may be made up of: money, both cash and money in a bank or building society account. This could include money paid out on a life insurance policy. money owed to the person who has died.
Real estate, stock and share, money in the bank or possessions are things traditionally classed as your estate, but we have a series of new things that I am calling my digital estate, while these are virtual they still have value.
Those of us building online businesses are creating digital assets that a) Have value and b) can be passed on in our estate.
Here are some of things I’ve been thinking about as I write this blog post:
- Websites
- Email lists
- Payment providers accounts (Stripe/Paypal etc)
- Client/Customer lists
- Contractor details
- Suppliers
- Social media accounts
- Email accounts
- Domain names
- Access to my SaaS accounts (Trello, Freshbooks and Managewp)
What Am I Going To Do?
So I’m going to write up a document and keep it with my will. I’m going to think about the things that have value and how she can keep them or dispose of them as she needs (or my kids need if she goes first).
I’m going to detail all the “digital things” I have with any monetary value. I’m thinking about areas of my business that have recurring income value and how they can keep working without me, I already have my maintenance plan largely running without me, can it run without me permanently and be passed on as an asset for example.
I’m going to write up how these assets can be sold or retained for a recurring income.
I’m going to document how to recover access to all these accounts, for example I found this to recover a google account.
I’m going to include in that document any debts I have, recurring invoices for software, how to pay the contractors I use.
And then finally we’ll have to sit down and go through this, that will be a fun session won’t it.
Wrap Up
That went dark pretty quickly didn’t it. Do you have a plan in place for your digital assets?
I study stoic philosophy and one of their ideas is Momento Mori, remember you will die or my favourite translation remember you have to die, it’s the process of meditating on your own mortality. It’s a good thing not a macabre thing.
If we think about our own mortality it helps us to put things into perspective, why am I worrying about that trivial thing when in the greater scheme of things it really won’t matter.
“You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.”
Marcus Aurelius
