It used to be easy.
When a client died, their personal representative went to the house, opened the file cabinet or the kitchen drawer, and found the statements. Bank accounts, brokerage accounts, life insurance, the timeshare, the credit cards. If something wasn’t in the drawer, it showed up in the mail over the next three months. By the end of the creditor period you had a complete picture of what the decedent owned and what they owed.
That playbook is dead.
People under fifty don’t get paper statements. They don’t get mail. Bank statements are in an email. Brokerage statements are in an email. The Delta SkyMiles account worth $8,000 in flights — also in an email. If you can’t get into the decedent’s email, you cannot identify the estate.
And getting into the email is not simple. The personal representative almost never has the password. The provider — Google, Apple, Microsoft — is not obligated to hand it over just because you’re the PR. Under the federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act, accessing someone else’s email without authorization can be a criminal offense, even with a court appointment, even with the best of intentions.
Florida addressed this in 2016 with the Florida Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, chapter 740. The statute gives personal representatives, trustees, agents under a power of attorney, and guardians a legal pathway to access digital assets. It is not automatic. The custodian — Google, Apple, Facebook, whoever — gets to choose how to comply. They can grant full access, partial access, or just send a printout. That last option happens more often than you’d think.
Chapter 740 also recognizes “online tools” — a provider’s own designation mechanism, like Google’s Inactive Account Manager or Facebook’s Legacy Contact. If the decedent set one up, it overrides the will, the trust, and the power of attorney. Read that again. A two-minute click-through on Google’s settings page beats a thousand-dollar trust document. Which means the estate planning conversation now has to include the question, “Did you set up any online tools?” — because if the client did, whatever they clicked controls.
Here’s what this looks like in practice. I open a probate. The decedent was sixty-eight, had a revocable trust, had a will, had a POA — all properly drafted. The PR doesn’t have the decedent’s Apple ID password. The decedent’s checking account is with an online-only bank with no branches and no paper statements. The PR knows the account exists because the mortgage was paid out of it, but they don’t have login credentials and the bank’s customer service line won’t talk to them without an authorization the decedent can no longer provide. We end up filing a 740 authorization request, waiting for Apple, getting into the email, finding the bank, then serving the bank with letters of administration. Eight weeks for what used to be a fifteen-minute drawer-check.
The practical answer is not a product. It’s planning.
Make a list of your digital accounts. Not the passwords — a list. Bank, brokerage, email, photo storage, cloud storage, social media, airline miles, hotel points, PayPal, Venmo, anything with a dollar value or sentimental value. Put the list with your estate planning documents. Tell your spouse or your personal representative where it is. Set up a password manager — 1Password, Bitwarden, whatever — with an emergency access or recovery mechanism so the right person can get in if you cannot. Use Google’s Inactive Account Manager. Use Apple’s Legacy Contact. Use Facebook’s Legacy Contact if Facebook matters to you.
Do all that, and the personal representative’s job is hard but possible.
Skip it, and you’re leaving your family to do forensic work on an encrypted life.
Digital assets are part of the estate like everything else — and finding them is now part of the personal representative’s job. More on the whole process on our Florida probate page.