Your entire life is online. Decades of family photos backed up to the cloud. Email threads that hold everything from financial records to precious memories. You may have a Facebook page full of moments your grandchildren might someday want to see. Venmo, PayPal, or cryptocurrency accounts that hold real value. Even the airline miles and hotel points you have been planning to use.

Most people never stop to ask what happens to any of this when they pass away. It is an easy thing to overlook, since digital assets do not feel like "property" the way a house or a car does. But North Carolina law is increasingly having to grapple with exactly this question, and families are often caught off guard by how complicated the answer can be. Understanding the basics of digital estate planning is a good first step, though the details are where families run into trouble, and where working with an estate planning attorney becomes so valuable.

What Counts as a Digital Asset In Your Estate?

A digital asset is any account, file, or online property that exists electronically rather than in physical form. Social media profiles fall into this category, but so do email accounts, cloud photo storage, online banking and investment accounts, digital subscriptions, domain names, cryptocurrency wallets, loyalty and rewards programs, and even smart home systems tied to an online account.

Some of these assets carry financial value or vital information. Others carry something harder to price but just as meaningful: your family's history, told through photos, messages, and the digital footprint of a life. Both types deserve a place in your planning, yet both are frequently left out of traditional estate plans that focus only on real estate, bank accounts, and other physical or financial property. Sorting out which of your accounts need specific legal attention, and which planning tools actually apply to each one, is not something most people can work out with confidence on their own.

Can Your Family Access Your Online Accounts After You Pass Away?

This is where most people are surprised to learn the answer is often no, at least not easily. Tech companies design their terms of service to protect user privacy, which means your family cannot simply log into your Facebook, Gmail, or Apple account after you pass away, even with a death certificate in hand. Without documented legal authority, loved ones may be locked out entirely, or forced into a slow, frustrating process with a company's legal or support department. 

North Carolina law now gives your named executor or agent a legal path to request access to your digital accounts. But this law only works if you have taken the right steps ahead of time, including naming the correct people with the correct authority in documents that meet the law's specific requirements. Without that foundation in place, your family may face months of delay, and in some cases, permanent loss of access to accounts and files that can never be recovered. 

What Happens To Your Photos, Videos, and Personal Memories?

Before becoming an estate planning attorney, I used to help families write and publish their family stories. I helped them digitize their pictures, slides, and scrapbooks. Preserving these assets for the people you love means a great deal to me. Ultimately, this is your true family wealth and will last much longer than your money, if carefully preserved. 

So, for many families, the financial accounts are not the biggest concern. It is the photos and videos, the thousands of memories stored on a phone, a laptop, or in the cloud, that matter most. If these important files are never accessed or transferred, that history can simply disappear when a subscription lapses or a platform deletes an inactive account.

This is part of why our firm's Life & Legacy Planning approach looks beyond documents alone. We believe family wealth includes not just financial assets, but also the pictures, stories, and values that connect generations. Digital assets deserve the same deliberate planning and protection as anything else you own, and the details of how to structure that protection under North Carolina law are not something most families should try to work out on their own.

Why Digital Asset Planning Requires More Than a Simple List of Passwords

It might seem like the solution is as easy as writing down your passwords somewhere safe. Unfortunately, that approach creates its own problems. Sharing passwords can violate a platform's terms of service, and simply having access to an account does not always mean your family has the legal authority to use, transfer, or close it. Laws around digital assets also vary depending on the type of account, the platform's own policies, and how your broader estate plan is structured.

Getting this right requires coordinated legal language across several parts of your estate plan, along with an understanding of both state law and federal privacy statutes that can affect access. These are not matters to piece together from a blog post or a generic online template. A plan that fails to account for even one of these details can leave your family without the access, or the memories, they were counting on. 

How Rasmussen Law Can Help Protect Your Digital Legacy

At Rasmussen Law, we help families throughout Apex, Cary, and the greater Triangle area build estate plans that account for the full picture of what they own and who they love, including the digital side of life that so many plans overlook. Through a Life and Legacy Planning Session, we take the time to understand your accounts, your priorities, and your family's story, then build a plan designed to actually work when your loved ones need it.

If you have wondered what would happen to your Facebook page, your family photos, or your other online accounts if something happened to you, now is the time to find out, rather than leaving your family to sort it out during an already difficult season. Contact our firm at 919-335-6300 to schedule your Life and Legacy Planning Session and make sure your digital legacy is protected along with everything else you have worked to build.