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044: Planning your digital estate
510 Plays4 years ago
In this episode, we interview Anna Hacker, the host of the ‘What Happens When I Die?’ podcast, about digital estate planning.
Anna Hacker is the National Manager of Estate Planning in the Trustees Services arm of Australian Unity. She trained as a lawyer and is an accredited specialist in Wills & Estates.
She hosts the popular podcast “What Happens When I Die?” which explores the legal outcomes of dying. In each episode, Anna is joined by guests to discuss what happens to your kids, your superannuation, your stuff and even your body after you pass away
What we talk about
During the interview, we chat with Anna about:
- The complexities of your digital footprint including photos, access to banking, digital files in the cloud, email accounts, passwords, social media accounts
- The rules for different email providers on how to access email accounts after you have died
- Making sure you don’t put passwords in your will as it becomes a public document
- Ghosting - identity theft after you die
- Appointing a digital executor - to ensure they have the skills needed to deal with digital assets
- Preparing a Digital register to include with your statement of wishes, including the location of digital assets and making sure it is kept updated
- Using a password manager to grant access to a loved one in case of death or incapacitation
- Understanding the rules of the various social media platforms and setting up a legacy contact on Facebook
- Sorting out your files and photos and having a conversation/death talk about what is important and where they can be found
- Making sure you update your will when there are key life events or changes.
- Podcast: What happens when I die
- Setting up a Facebook Legacy Contact
- Episode 11: Drafting Wills and Powers of Attorney
Please head to the Life Admin Life Hacks Facebook page to connect with listeners and share your thoughts, questions or suggestions.
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Transcript
Introduction to Hosts and Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
This is Life Admin Life Hacks, a podcast that gives you techniques, tips and tools to tackle your life admin more efficiently, to save your time, your money and improve your household harmony. I'm Diana Roberts, an Operations Manager, and I just set up my Facebook Legacy Contact. I'm Mia Northrock, a researcher and writer who apologises in advance for whoever has to deal with my digital, functional legacy.
Meet Anna Hacker: Digital Estate Planning Expert
00:00:27
Speaker
This episode, we interview Anna Hacker, lawyer and podcast host. Hello and welcome to Life Admin Life Hacks. In this episode, we talk to Anna Hacker who stepped us through the things we should be thinking about when it comes to digital estate planning to make it easier for those we leave behind. How to make sure passwords are available when you pass, setting up legacy arrangements for social media and email storage. If you don't have a register of your digital assets sorted with your will,
00:00:56
Speaker
This app is for you. Anna Hacker is the National Manager of Estate Planning in the Trustee Services Arm of Australian Unity. She trained as a lawyer and is an accredited specialist in wills and estates. And she hosts the popular podcast, What Happens When I Die, which explores the legal outcomes of dying.
00:01:13
Speaker
Each episode, Anna is joined by guests to discuss what happens to your kids, your superannuation, your stuff, and even your body after you pass away. Anna, thanks so much for coming on the show. Not a problem. I'm very, very happy to be here.
00:01:27
Speaker
So you have a wealth of knowledge when it comes to estate planning, but an area that we're particularly unfamiliar with and interested in is digital estate planning.
Why Plan Your Digital Estate Early?
00:01:35
Speaker
Yeah, this is something that wasn't even around when I started as a lawyer. So it's certainly an ever evolving area of law and something that all I can say is we get more and more questions around this, both from people during their lifetime, but also after someone's passed away. So it's definitely something that is top of mind for most clients.
00:01:56
Speaker
Yeah, we're all increasing our digital footprint and a lot of our advice on the podcast is about going more digital. So what is the most important thing we should be thinking about when it comes to digital estate planning?
00:02:08
Speaker
The most important thing is that the part of planning is critical. If you haven't thought in advance about what you'd like to happen to your estate from a digital point of view, then unfortunately, it's something that probably can't be done very quickly. Unfortunately, we do have some clients come to us on their deathbed, and that can be very complicated to try and
00:02:29
Speaker
deal with not just people's assets, the physical assets that you can see, but also then their digital ones. Because as you can imagine, digital assets, it's almost like how long is a piece of string. People probably haven't even thought of everything that they have in place and where they can actually direct people to
Understanding Digital Assets
00:02:46
Speaker
find them. What is a digital asset? What counts as a digital asset?
00:02:50
Speaker
There's lots of different parts to digital assets. There's probably a little bit more obvious ones, so your digital photos, your computer. That used to be the main thing that people would think of. I need to make sure that I'm going to give my computer to someone and they can turn it on and they can access all of my files. I'm not sure that anyone has a computer as easy to access as it used to be. We now have passwords, we have websites that we view, things are in the cloud. They're not actually physically on the computer.
00:03:19
Speaker
Even when we talked previously about digital assets, there was still a physical component to it. Now, digital assets are very much digital. It's the photos. It's bank accounts. That's not technically a digital asset, but you might only be able to access some of your bank accounts through the web.
00:03:37
Speaker
You might not even have statements that are sent to you physically. They might be emailed through. And these are even the things that we talk about because, okay, the bank account itself is still a normal asset, but the access to your email account is the critical thing that needs to be dealt with with your estate planning from a digital point of view. Who has your passwords? And as a lawyer, I would never say to someone, write all of your passwords down, but it's actually really hard to work out how you can pass on the information in your
00:04:05
Speaker
your email accounts in your Instagram, your Facebook account, your LinkedIn. How do you actually pass these on to people without writing down passwords? And obviously there's ways you can do it, but you have to plan
Challenges for Executors in the Digital Age
00:04:20
Speaker
in advance. So that's the critical part. So what happens if you die and no one knows your passwords?
00:04:25
Speaker
One of the things that we talk about with Life Admin is moving a lot of your files to cloud-based storage, using the cloud to organize your documents. What happens in an instance when someone passes away and no one has access to those passwords?
00:04:41
Speaker
So generally, an executor of your will, so that's the person who you appoint to manage your estate after you've passed away. They step into your shoes in a legal sense. They can in some ways, not necessarily very easily, get access to your accounts. And I say not easily because a lot of the
00:05:00
Speaker
Let's say we think about our email. Our email accounts are generally the ones that have access to other things. If you can access your email, then often you can at least find out where different digital assets are, where your bank account is, where your photos are held. And I know that one email provider requires you to fax a copy of a death certificate. I know. I know. But I find it hilarious that it's...
00:05:25
Speaker
Sorry. I haven't heard of anyone asking for a fax for a very long time. You obviously don't work in the healthcare system, Mia, because the fax is still alive and well in the healthcare system. No, but I agree. For most of us, I wouldn't even know where to... I think you can often scan things and technically fax them from your computer, but every single provider has a different requirement for what to do.
00:05:48
Speaker
here, if we have to close a bank account, there's a very similar process to closing most bank accounts. It might be a different form, but it's generally the same process. It's completely different when it comes to anything that's a digital asset, and especially the email accounts. In some cases, and I know Yahoo, it just shuts. You can't actually access it. No one can access it, not even your executor.
00:06:09
Speaker
So it's really important to understand. And this is where I've had a client get tripped up, unfortunately, because they contacted Yahoo and because they were advised that the person had passed away, the account was closed. And that meant then they couldn't access anything.
00:06:25
Speaker
Can you imagine reconstructing someone's digital footprint without access to their email account? This is probably not legal advice and I can't say don't close your ears because everyone's listening and there's no other way to pass the information on but there are ways that you can digitally have your passwords in the
00:06:44
Speaker
the password centres on your computer, it still means giving someone access to your computer. You can have sometimes, and I'm not saying that this is something I would necessarily recommend because there are risks to writing down your passwords, but we certainly get envelopes.
00:06:59
Speaker
from people, from clients that are held in a safe with all of their password. I'm assuming with their passwords because I haven't even opened them. Who knows? It might be some sort of long lost secret about a child that no one knows about. But I think it's actually password. That's the critical information people are writing down.
00:07:16
Speaker
Gosh, opening that envelope for anticipation. I was going to say this is kind of a case for a password manager because then perhaps you only have to share the one master password with, you know, put the one master password in that envelope and then they can get in and actually have passwords to all of your different apps.
00:07:34
Speaker
And if my password manager, I can share passwords with my family because I have passed like a family membership. So my husband has access and even my daughter has access to some of our family passwords. So I think that really is where you can start to really be clever about the use of a password manager to make sure that people could get access to the most important item at the right time. If it was an accident, then I'm guessing that might be problematic. But
00:07:59
Speaker
I'm pretty sure in my password manager's settings, there is a provision to actually email someone, or there is a provision for this exact scenario where I should have researched that before the episode. There are. There is a provision to
Best Practices for Password Management
00:08:15
Speaker
share the password. And some people also have ones, and this is probably a bit more macabre, but if you haven't logged on for a certain amount of time,
00:08:24
Speaker
It's like on a train if you don't, a dead man break. I think if your foot comes off it, then the train comes off because it's the opposite. If you haven't logged into an account or you haven't registered that you're still alive, basically.
00:08:39
Speaker
It will automatically send through details to people to say, because this person hasn't logged in for two weeks or a month or whatever, we're assuming that they've passed away. And here's details. The one place that you shouldn't put it, and I have seen this unfortunately before, is in your will. So people think, I'll put it in my will because that's always kept secret until I pass away.
00:09:01
Speaker
not realizing the will actually becomes a public document after you pass away. And it's actually filed at the court. It's accessible by anyone. And it seems like a good idea, but unfortunately, I've seen passwords in wills, and that can cause all sorts of issues if it's not attended to. What about the statement of wishes? Is that a public document?
00:09:22
Speaker
That's the letter that you have alongside your will that just sort of has general guidance. Is that a public document? Would it be safe to put it there? Generally, the statements of wishes are not public documents, so that would be an ideal place as well. Again, coming back to the risk of having your passwords written down and also
00:09:40
Speaker
Of course, potentially needing to update them regularly. You need to make sure that you did do that if you had these sorts of passwords in a statement of wishes, but a statement of wishes is not public unless, and this is going to get a little technical, but sometimes people accidentally make them wills because they accidentally put a bit too much in. You do have to be careful, but a statement of wishes is ideal because you'll have things like, this is what I might want to happen with my jewelry because you don't always want to put everything into it.
00:10:06
Speaker
into the will because then it might be about 20 or 30 pages long. So you'll say, I want this jewellery to go here, this to go there, and then people will also have information around. And I want this person to have access to these photos, these files, this part of my digital footprint. So yeah, absolutely. That's another way that people leave information and information about how to access digital assets.
00:10:30
Speaker
I do think that's interesting, though, that you mentioned that things could become publicly accidentally, because I did read an article ages ago about someone's identity being stolen after they die, like post-mortem cyber crime. Is that a real risk, do you think?
Risks of Posthumous Identity Theft
00:10:45
Speaker
The term is ghosting, so that is usually what happens when someone's just passed away. If someone is appropriately administering an estate, there's only quite a small window at which
00:10:55
Speaker
people aren't informed that they've passed away. For example, when we're a trustee company, this is one of our jobs. We immediately write out to people to say, cancel license, tell the bank this person's passed away, tell Vic Rhodes this person's passed away, tell all of the different providers that they've passed away. There is a window though, and especially if you don't have someone who maybe knows what their role as an executor is where they might not contact people,
00:11:22
Speaker
for a year. And in that year, someone could potentially, I mean, I'm not saying it's widespread, but it is it is known that people do steal the identities of people who've passed away. And it's a bit easier than someone who's alive because there's no one really monitoring it, you know, in that time. So it is a risk. It is a risk. Wow. That's post-mortem cybercrime. Sounds like a Tom Cruise movie.
00:11:51
Speaker
There are certainly ways to make sure you're protected though and that's really having the right people in those roles of executor or someone who's assisting to administer your estate and making sure they know they're in the role because that's the biggest risk. I've certainly unfortunately had to say to people
00:12:06
Speaker
I know that you think you're the executor, but it's actually this other person. And that can be even spouses who think they're an executor and suddenly they find out it's actually a friend or another relative. And if the person doesn't know they're an executor, of course they're not going to be acting quickly because they don't even know there's something to do. So it's really important. Planning, telling people enough information so that they can act quickly to protect not just your assets, but actually your identity.
00:12:34
Speaker
Yeah, wow. Very much worthwhile letting your executor know that they're the executor. And I guess I hope that that person's going to act with a sense of urgency and get onto this stuff in a timely way.
00:12:46
Speaker
So I guess, you know, if some of us listeners out there, I'm sure most of our listeners are in that sort of age bracket where increasingly we are becoming responsible for dealing with a family member's digital estate after they're passed on. We are becoming this generation, Gen X, millennials, often executives. So what does need to be done? You've mentioned that there's all these people that we need to contact to advise that someone's deceased. What else?
00:13:11
Speaker
What else do we need to keep? What do we delete? Where do we keep it? I guess the interesting difference with digital assets compared with your physical assets is that there's so many different assets now out there that have to be dealt with in different ways. It's quite easy to say, here's some furniture. I'm going to sell it. We often recommend putting in a digital executor.
00:13:33
Speaker
So not just someone who is, you've got your executor and look, I'll be honest, you know, my, my husband can do both roles. He understands digital assets. He understands what he'd need to look at. That's fine. He can do both roles. Let's say 20 years ago and let's pretend there were more digital assets.
00:13:50
Speaker
If I was thinking my parents were my executor of my will, well, my parents had a clue what to do with digital assets. I'd want to put someone else in that I felt would have a greater understanding of what the digital assets are, how to deal with them, and also how important
Appointing a Digital Executor
00:14:06
Speaker
they were. Certainly, photos and things, yes, my parents would have understood that.
00:14:10
Speaker
How do we even access it? So I think that that's where this other role of a digital executor can be quite useful. And then they can have, as you were mentioning before, the statement of wishes. They can have a more detailed statement of wishes specifically about digital assets.
00:14:26
Speaker
I think I read an article about putting together a register of digital assets. What are some of the things you might want to include in it and to include with that statement of wishes? Definitely including where to actually find all of the assets. That could be the photos where it is actually on your computer. We've already talked about the passwords, so I'll
00:14:47
Speaker
not go into detail about that because I think that some people do include lots of information like passwords and things here, but I think that the password managers are a really good resource to use for that. So if we're thinking just about what are the assets, it's the same as the list of assets that your physical assets, but it's updating. That's the biggest difference that we're seeing with digital assets versus your physical assets.
00:15:10
Speaker
If it's a digital asset, people often change them a bit more quickly, depending on what it is. And I guess I'm thinking a lot of financial products that might be online. Again, you don't have the physical statements, so you're relying on your email account and things like that.
00:15:25
Speaker
If it's photos, well, you need to make sure that people know what you actually want to do with those. The other side of all of this, so we've talked about the assets, but part of what your digital footprint is, is your social media accounts. That's a whole other kettle of fish.
00:15:41
Speaker
In most cases, it's not as easy to take these over. Each platform has a different way of accessing it. And that's where you have your statement of, well, for my Facebook account, you're the legacy contact. And that's something that with Facebook, for example, you can have a legacy contact and you make sure that you have that person updated, but then make sure that that's reflected in other documents, too. So there's not a conflict between who you have as a digital executor and then who you have as a legacy contact for platforms.
00:16:10
Speaker
Is that a setting on the platforms? It is. So sometimes you have to search a little bit to try and find these that they're often not as easy to find. But the legacy setting on Facebook, I did this, I guess it's probably a bit more of an interest of mine. So I was quite interested to understand how it worked. And I'm hoping all our listeners right now are taking out their to do list and adding
00:16:32
Speaker
Check legacy settings on all of their social media accounts. It makes it so much easier because as I said we can have a digital executor we can have a will that talks about things you can have a statement of wishes but each provider might have different requirements for what they need and if the easiest thing to do is actually set the legacy contact before you've passed away.
00:16:53
Speaker
that's absolutely the best thing to do. Because as I said, in one case, you might have to fax someone. In another, it might be that and I have had this with an overseas provider where they didn't actually recognize the overseas documents and we had to and obviously, we weren't going to do this for a social media account. But
00:17:11
Speaker
They actually were wanting us to have the probate documents, which is where we go to court in Australia. We're in Commonwealth countries to say this is the will and I'm the executor and I have authority to act. They wouldn't actually accept that they needed an American-based
00:17:26
Speaker
document and that was virtually impossible for us to get and certainly not cost effective. So that's where the planning, so making sure you look at every provider and I thought it would be great if there was one resource that showed every single one, but it is a matter of going in and you can find them, but you have to search for them. Wow. And are there some legal rights that relate to physical possessions that don't apply to digital ones? What's important for us to know there?
00:17:51
Speaker
In most cases, digital assets are treated in a similar way to a physical asset. I know we're getting slightly off topic here, but that's even the way that the law's changing at the moment because we're having to do most wills virtually. Wills are even being done by remote witnessing, which has never happened. It's been thousands of years
00:18:14
Speaker
hundreds of years of doing wills where you have to be in the same room as the will maker and you have to sign with the same pen. The law there is pivoted and it's actually allowing us to sign remotely through video conferencing and that's a massive change.
00:18:29
Speaker
So, I guess that with the digital assets, the difference that we're seeing is that, yes, they're generally seen in most cases as the same type of asset. So, you can have digital photo. That's basically the same as having a normal photo that's been printed out. But it's the platforms that are the biggest difference because
00:18:48
Speaker
that's not necessarily subject to the legislation or laws and in Australia we actually don't have a lot of legislation around what happens with these sorts of digital assets that are purely digital, so your social media accounts and that sort of thing. The problem with the legislation not sort of catching up is then the providers are the ones that do get to control what happens and how it's controlled and how they can pass on
00:19:12
Speaker
access to someone. And that's, I guess, where we have a big difference between, you know, you physically have, I can't think what the precursor to Facebook accounts was in a physical sense, but let's say it was, you know, you're physically going and you've got some sort of a physical, you know, club.
Legal Views on Digital vs. Physical Assets
00:19:29
Speaker
And then that's very different because it would have a constitution that's subject to legislation and you can pass on even membership, let's say in that club, Facebook controls it.
00:19:40
Speaker
Facebook controls access. So that's the biggest problem. It's different from every single provider. And so that's where also coming back to planning is really important. So thinking all this through in advance about what's important to you and if it is important to you, making sure that the platforms you're on are ones that you're confident will be able to pass on to those you want. But coming back to the physical computer and I guess the organization,
00:20:05
Speaker
When my grandmother died years ago I wasn't the executive but my uncle was and he had no idea about computers so I was given the job of sorting through her computer but she didn't have any passwords but there was just no file or folder structure it was just a complete nightmare. So what can we be doing to make it easier for those that are left behind and how can we be kept getting things organized.
00:20:29
Speaker
I think that the biggest thing is you think about what would happen if this wasn't me looking at this. I'll give an example of something I've had from, and obviously I'm not breaking confidentiality here, I'm going to be talking generalities, but let's say someone had a book and they said, I'm giving this book to so and so. Well, unless we know the actual location on the computer or if it's even on a computer, is it on a USB?
00:20:53
Speaker
We need to have more information. So again, the statement of wishes can be helpful. This is where all my important information is. We often have people say, not here's my statement of wishes. Tell people, here's the link to that information. Not here's a printed out copy. Here's a link to the statement of wishes that I've only got in a digital form now.
00:21:15
Speaker
So it's thinking about, if it wasn't me, if it was someone else, how would I actually access this? And I mean, I think that's difficult when it is someone who may not be proficient anyway with a computer or with, you know, I'm thinking, my mum's great on her iPad, but if I probably went into her computer, there would be very little structure for what she's put in place. I'm just wincing thinking about my mum's desktop on the computer. Oh my God.
00:21:41
Speaker
That's great, but I think for her and my mum, she knows how to find everything she needs. But if I had to go in there, I think that, again, the statement of wishes, just talking. This is the same for everything when it comes to estate planning. When you're trying to think about
00:21:56
Speaker
Okay, it's a tough topic to talk about. You're talking about after you've passed away or potentially, and this is sometimes worse, I haven't passed away, but I've lost capacity and I need someone to come in and look at this and you need to have had conversations around that.
00:22:11
Speaker
And as silly as it might sound, it is a case of, is there anything on your computer that I need to, you know, is there something that you want me to look at? I know my dad's been talking for years about that he has a diary somewhere. Does he actually want us to find that? I might not want to read that diary. Or maybe it would be a great family history. I don't know. So having those conversations to not just plan yourself,
00:22:38
Speaker
I think you need to involve family members, and that's the same thing with everything to do with estate planning. It's a really hard thing to talk about with other people, but if you do, it will lead to a relief later on because when someone passes away, that's clearly one of the worst times that people who are left behind's life, they're grief-stricken.
00:22:58
Speaker
They don't want to think about this, but they're also probably aware that they need to. You need to deal with it. And if you have some guidance and understanding, let's say my mum says, I don't actually really, I just have not really anything important on that computer. Well, maybe that's not the priority to look at.
00:23:16
Speaker
if instead she says, all of the photos are there, but I hid them because I wanted to make sure no one could find them easily. Well, I probably need to have a bit more information there. So that conversation I think is really critical. And the other thing it's like when you, and I'm not sure whether either of you have had this experience, but it used to be when people were thinking about
00:23:37
Speaker
which pieces of furniture or pieces of jewelry they'd give to someone. They'd even get family members over to literally go around, while they're still alive, to go around a house and mark with stickers what it is. My grandmother had the stickers. My mum's doing it now.
00:23:54
Speaker
My ex-husband's grandma just wrote names on the backs of things. Someone might have said, I really love that painting. She's thought about it and she's put the name on because it meant something. I think that can be very similarly done for digital assets. If we think about what we traditionally had, what was some of the most important things we used to inherit from family? It was photo albums.
00:24:19
Speaker
Yes, furniture is nice. Jewelry is also very special. Those photo albums, they're the thing I remember even as a child looking through of my grandparents. We don't have photo albums often anymore. And that's where we need to make sure that if that's the important thing that people will want to know where it is and who's also going to get access. Having said that, you can probably make copies on USBs. That's what people do nowadays. But then who is it that's going to manage that? Have a conversation. Get around a table.
00:24:49
Speaker
I think they talk about having death talks. Yeah, that sounds a bit morbid, but it's much better to have had that discussion than be left and have no idea what you're meant to be doing.
00:24:59
Speaker
I feel like I need to apologise in advance to my executive for leaving the legacy of my 12,000 unorganised digital photos. Maybe that's the final motivator I need to get them. Yeah, maybe. I've organised mine and my daughter knows how they're organised, so I feel like I'm sort of slightly ahead of the curve now, but I do have 33,000.
00:25:21
Speaker
Definitely some culling needed because she doesn't want 33,000 photos of my trips to Europe when I was 19. I'm busily writing things down, busily adding things to my to-do list as we're talking. I'm actually going through the process right now of updating my will.
00:25:37
Speaker
And the lawyer that I'm working with hasn't mentioned any of this, hasn't mentioned anything to do with digital assets or having a digital executor. So I'm going to have to go back to them with these further requirements. And I guess, you know, the trigger for me updating this is separating from my husband and needing to look at my executors and beneficiaries and all of that stuff afresh.
00:25:58
Speaker
If people don't have those, I mean, when do you suggest that people make these changes? Is it when they're doing changes to their will after these kinds of other trigger scenarios or is this something that everyone should just address immediately regardless if there are no other changes in their will at the moment?
00:26:14
Speaker
I think that people need to, this is something, estate planning is something that should, it's not a set and forget situation. And it is very common that people look at their estate planning and particularly now with needing to think about digital assets as well, they look at those triggers. And the most common triggers are what you've just talked about. It's often there's a new relationship or there's the ending of a relationship or there's a new family member, there might be a new baby, there might be a new grandchild, there might be a trip
00:26:43
Speaker
because they're thinking, oh my gosh, I'm about to go on a plane. Better do a will. That's probably the most common time people come in to get their first will done, actually, is when they're about to go off on a trip. But I think that that's, I guess, the other side of estate planning that it is something that, yes, the triggers are really helpful to making sure that it actually suits what your objectives are, because those are times when the objectives might change. But the reality is that you probably should look every four years just to see
00:27:10
Speaker
is it actually still suiting my objectives? There's not a sort of big trigger, but there might be something that has changed that I'm not even thinking about. And I really think people need to get at least thinking about what their will might look like from when they're even 18 years old.
The Importance of Digital Estate Planning for Youth
00:27:26
Speaker
Because if you think about the first job, and nowadays, people's first job, they're going to have superannuation, there's going to be insurance, there's going to be hundreds of thousands of dollars potentially there in their estate, that they're not even realizing is there some of the saddest
00:27:40
Speaker
state administration matters I've had have been very young people who've passed away and it has been there's been no guidance so it sounds terrible at 18 to think about doing a will but it's I guess to me not about I think I'm going something's going to happen it's about no I need to plan and it's important to plan to make sure that it is all in place so that I don't it's a normal part of what I do I get my medical health checks I get my will health checks
00:28:08
Speaker
So I think the triggers are important. But then once you've sort of started the first estate plan or will, you need to make sure it's every four years you think about what is it that I need to update here. And it might be nothing, might be nothing for 20 or 30 years. Yeah, touch wood.
00:28:24
Speaker
I guess with young people, you know, the fact that they are digital natives, they can have very rich online lives and manage so much of their life online. So yeah, even for young people, they might have sort of more digital assets than physical ones.
00:28:39
Speaker
Absolutely. And I think that that also, one thing I've noticed, I must have been searching for certain things on my phone where now I have a million ads for online wills. And all online wills are not quite the same. I think that all of the complications we've just talked about in this episode, it's complicated. And you might not think it is, but the reality is that even just the digital asset side can be very complicated. So
00:29:08
Speaker
It's definitely worth seeing a lawyer as you've done because I think it's important to make sure that all those things you're not thinking about, at least you've had a chance to cast your mind over it and make sure that everything's included. Make it as easy, the hook or will is, yes, it's for your peace of mind, but it is kind of more for the people that are left peace of mind as well.
00:29:30
Speaker
And listeners, episode 11, we had a whole episode that was around drafting wills and powers of attorney. So if you want to get into the nuts and bolts of, of will drafting generally, head over to the episode 11. So Anna, before we finish up, are there any resources you might recommend for our listeners if they want to explore any of this further, any checklists or apps you might suggest?
00:29:50
Speaker
I think that the main thing is that where they are on platforms to look at those specific platforms for what the legacy requirements are or where is it that they can pass on the access for after they've passed away. I think that for digital assets in general, it is looking at those provisions
00:30:10
Speaker
And I think that normally though for estate planning, there are lots of different resources out there. You know, my own podcast is one that hopefully it can be useful and looks at this particular topic also from a bit of a legal point of view, but certainly to assist with understanding what to do for legacy contacts. And I can certainly send through some resources as well that you can put into the show notes that can be useful for people if that's helpful.
00:30:37
Speaker
That'd be great. And I thank so much for sharing your experience and these ideas with us today. It's been a strange pleasure to have the mind brought in on my to-do list. Just did get quite a little workout right then.
00:30:52
Speaker
But this is really important, and this is probably, you know, you do hear the stories of people not being able to access family members' Facebook accounts and the kind of feeling a little haunted there, or not being able to access online-only bank accounts where there's no bricks and mortar bank, there's no, you know, bricks and mortar thing to deal with. So, say thank you. Where can our listeners find out more if they want to hear from you more?
00:31:16
Speaker
My podcast is called What Happens When I Die? And it might sound a little morbid, but we wanted to be as direct as possible. So it was quite clear what we were talking about. It's a hopefully very practical approach to understanding wills and actually what happens to kids super and your stuff after you pass away. So hopefully will be useful for your listeners.
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00:31:38
Speaker
And I do really appreciate being able to come here and speak about the digital asset side of things because it's
00:31:43
Speaker
I'll tell you what, it's only going to get more and more complicated. So the more people do now to help those that are left behind, the better.
00:31:53
Speaker
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