The Digital Afterlife

Your grandmother's photo albums and bank statements sat in a box, waiting for someone to flip through them. Your own records live differently: photos, email, and increasingly your money locked behind a password only you know.

Our lives used to leave behind physical traces. Now they leave behind logins, including the accounts that matter most. When something happens to us, the people who love us often have no way in.

Michigan has a law meant to help, but only if you've planned ahead. Michigan's Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act establishes a pecking order for who can access a digital account after death, covering email, social media, and financial accounts alike. At the top is not necessarily your will or trust – it is any direction you provided through a platform’s own online tools.

That's where a feature like Apple's Legacy Contact comes in, a setting that lets you name someone to access your account after you pass away. Google and Facebook offer similar tools. Most banks do not, which is why those accounts rely more heavily on your estate documents.

Without a platform tool, your estate documents are the next line of defense, but only if specific. A will that vaguely covers "all property" often isn't enough, especially for financial institutions, which often require clear documentation before releasing funds. The law also separates an account's existence, easier to access, from its contents: messages, photos, transaction details. If you want a fiduciary to have full access, your documents need to say so plainly.

Without either, the fallback is the platform's fine print, which is rarely written with death in mind and can leave the account inaccessible or locked.

One thing planning can't always fix: cryptocurrency. No legal authority unlocks a wallet without the private key. Lose that, and the asset is gone.

Although your digital footprint may be complicated, the fix is simple: turn on a legacy contact where it exists, be specific in your estate documents, keep a private list of key accounts, and treat a crypto wallet as its own line item. If you’re not sure where your plan stands, it’s worth a conversation now.