Including Digital Assets in Your Palm Beach Estate Plan

Your life is online: email, photo libraries, social media, cloud storage, online banking, loyalty points, domain names, and increasingly cryptocurrency. When a Palm Beach family member passes, these digital assets can be locked away, lost forever, or fought over, all because the estate plan never mentioned them. Florida has a specific law on point, and the mistakes here are entirely avoidable.

Mistake 1: Assuming Your Family Can Just Log In

Sharing passwords is not a plan, and using a deceased person’s credentials can violate the provider’s terms of service and even federal law. Florida adopted the Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (found in Chapter 740 of the Florida Statutes), which gives personal representatives, trustees, and agents under a power of attorney a legal pathway to access digital assets, but only when your documents grant that authority. Silence in your will or trust can leave your fiduciary blocked.

Mistake 2: Forgetting to Grant Explicit Authority

Under Florida’s law, the levels of access a fiduciary gets depend on what you authorized. Your will, trust, and especially your durable power of attorney (Chapter 709) should each contain language expressly empowering your fiduciary to access, manage, and close your digital accounts and electronic communications. Without that specific grant, providers may limit access to only basic information, or deny it altogether.

Mistake 3: Ignoring Online Tools the Providers Offer

Many platforms now offer their own legacy or inactive-account tools, letting you name someone to manage or close your account. Florida’s law gives those provider-level designations priority. If you set one up and it conflicts with your will, the online tool usually wins. Make sure the two are consistent rather than working against each other.

Mistake 4: Losing Cryptocurrency Forever

Crypto is uniquely unforgiving. If no one knows the wallet exists, or no one has the private keys and seed phrase, the asset is simply gone, no court in Palm Beach County or anywhere else can recover it. Maintain a secure, regularly updated inventory of what you hold and where, with instructions on how a trusted fiduciary can locate the keys, stored separately from the keys themselves.

Mistake 5: Treating It as Only a Tech Problem

Some digital assets have real financial or sentimental value: a monetized account, a valuable domain, decades of family photos. List them. A simple, secured inventory, kept current and referenced by your estate documents, turns chaos into a checklist for your loved ones. Note that Florida has no state estate or inheritance tax, so the focus is purely on access and control, not state death taxes.

Mistake 6: Letting the Inventory Go Stale

Accounts and assets change constantly. Review your digital inventory whenever you review the rest of your plan, and store it securely, never simply pasted into a will that becomes a public record once filed with the court.

Talk to a Florida Attorney

Digital assets sit at the intersection of Florida’s Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, your power of attorney, and your will or trust, and the language has to be deliberate to actually work. Before you assume your family can sort it out later, have a licensed Florida estate planning attorney update your documents with proper digital-asset authority for your Palm Beach estate.