When most people start to think about their estate planning goals, the primary focus is how they would like their real and personal assets to be distributed. This makes sense. Determining who you would like to inherit your house, business and financial accounts is of vital importance. But they are not the only things of value that you will leave behind; you may also want to consider your online or digital assets.

It seems like everyone today is on Facebook or some other online social networking service. We upload our photos to Flick to share them with our friends and family. At the very least many people have web-based email accounts such as Yahoo Mail or Gmail that contain hundreds of important and cherished communications from our children and loved ones. Some individuals and businesses even use online storage space such as Google Docs to keep important and valuable documents and other information in the 'cloud.' Have you considered how you would like these assets to be managed, accessed and distributed after you are gone?

Fortunately, many digital assets are easily distributed. If you have a large collection of pictures in your Facebook account or online picture sharing site, it may be possible to make these available to every family member who would like them. But for other online assets this may not be possible and care should be given as to how you would like these to be distributed.

But before these assets can be distributed or shared it first must be possible for someone else to access them. It would be a shame if your family was unable to recover emails and photos that you have accumulated over the years. In this age of digital communication it may be that these items only exist online and that there is not a hard copy anywhere. When making your estate plan it may be worthwhile to review all of your online assets and ensure that you have documented your user names and passwords and put them in a secure place.

Source: Channel 5 News "Digital life adds different dimension to estate planning," Jordan Shefte, Dec. 19, 2011