A will decides who inherits your property. It does not, on its own, give anyone the legal right to log into your email, your cloud storage, or your crypto exchange. Those live behind federal privacy law and provider terms of service, and under Florida's Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (Chapter 740, Florida Statutes) your fiduciary needs specific authority before a company will grant access. This guide is the working sequence I use to close that gap.
For the legal background on where a standard will leaves your executor locked out, see the companion article on the six digital assets your Florida executor can't legally access.
Inputs you need before you start
- • A list of the devices, email accounts, and phone ecosystem that anchor everything else.
- • The financial accounts, exchanges, and wallets that hold real value.
- • Any monetized or business accounts: domains, storefronts, SaaS, content channels.
- • The person you actually trust to act as digital fiduciary — and a backup.
- • A secure place to store credentials that is safe while you live and findable when you do not.
Mistakes to avoid
- • Assuming the will covers digital access — it does not without explicit authority language.
- • Putting passwords directly in the will, which becomes a public probate record.
- • Granting authority but leaving a crypto seed phrase only in your head.
- • Setting authority for death but ignoring incapacity in the power of attorney.
- • Building an inventory once and never updating it as accounts change.
Step 1: Inventory the six categories
List every account across the six categories that carry access or value: email, cloud storage and photos, cryptocurrency and exchange accounts, social media and content accounts, subscriptions and financial apps, and business logins and domains. You cannot plan for what you have not written down, and discovery is where most fiduciaries fail. Keep this list separate from the will itself.
Step 2: Set the online-tool designations first
Under the Florida statute, a provider's own online tool outranks everything else — including your will. Set them now: Google's Inactive Account Manager, Apple's Legacy Contact, and Facebook's Legacy Contact are the high-value ones. This is the single highest-leverage step, it takes minutes, and it does not require a lawyer.
Step 3: Write digital-asset authority into your will and trust
Where no online tool exists, your estate-planning documents control — but only if they contain an explicit grant of authority over digital assets and the content of electronic communications. General or older wills almost never do. The language has to track the statute to be honored by providers, which is where drafting matters.
Step 4: Add the same authority to your durable power of attorney
Incapacity arrives more often, and more suddenly, than death. A durable power of attorney with digital-asset authority lets your agent keep a business running, pay bills, and manage accounts while you are alive but unable to act. Authority that only triggers at death leaves the most common emergency unaddressed.
Step 5: Solve the crypto access problem separately
Legal authority and practical access are two different problems for cryptocurrency. A fiduciary who is authorized to control a wallet still cannot recover a lost seed phrase. Document the custody arrangement securely — a sealed instruction, a hardware backup, or a qualified custodian — so the keys survive you without being exposed while you live.
Step 6: Store the inventory securely and keep it current
Never put passwords in the will; it becomes a public record in probate. Use a password manager with an emergency-access feature, a sealed document with your attorney, or a dedicated digital-vault service. Then review it on a schedule — accounts, values, and providers change, and a stale inventory sends your fiduciary chasing dead ends.
When attorney help is worth it
The online-tool designations you can and should handle yourself today. The drafting — authority language that tracks Chapter 740 in your will, trust, and power of attorney — is where DIY forms fall short, because generic templates rarely include it and providers reject language that does not match the statute. The firm's flat-fee SnapHeirs digital estate plan is $199: it writes the authority into your documents, walks you through the online-tool setup, and structures the secure inventory across all six categories.
Soft next step
Want the digital estate plan handled for you?
The SnapHeirs engagement at $199 covers the authority language, the online-tool walkthrough, and a secure inventory framework built around the six categories above.
Review the SnapHeirs digital estate plan →