Chicago Business Attorney Blog
Most estate plans were built around a picture of what a person owns that no longer matches how people actually live. A house, a car, a bank account, some furniture. But think about what’s actually sitting on your phone and in the cloud right now. Photos of your kids that only exist on your phone or in a cloud account. Years of email. A cryptocurrency wallet. A small online business or Etsy shop. Airline miles, streaming subscriptions, social media accounts your family will want to memorialize or shut down.
None of that fits neatly into a traditional will written for physical property, and if nobody has planned for it specifically, your family could find themselves locked out of things you fully intended for them to have.
Why “They’ll Just Log In” Doesn’t Work
It feels like it should be simple. Your family knows your passwords, or they can find them, and they log in and handle things. In practice, it rarely works that way, and the reason is legal, not just technical.
Illinois has adopted the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, known as RUFADAA. It governs when an executor, trustee, or agent can legally access someone’s digital accounts after death or incapacity, and it sets up a hierarchy for how that access is determined. That hierarchy puts online tools first meaning a legacy contact you set up directly with Google or Apple can actually override instructions in your will if the two conflict. Your estate planning documents come next, and if neither of those address a given account, the platform’s own terms of service control, which often means very limited access for your family regardless of what you intended.
This means your executor logging into your email with a password they found written down somewhere is not actually legal authority, even if it’s technically possible. Platforms are also allowed to treat the content of your private messages differently than basic account information, and without explicit consent in your estate documents, your family may be able to see that an account existed without ever being able to read what’s in it.
What This Looks Like Without a Plan
Picture the situation your family could face without anything in place. Your executor knows you had significant photos stored in a cloud account, but the platform has no record of any legacy contact, and your will never mentioned digital assets at all. The platform’s terms of service become the deciding factor, and those terms are written to protect the platform, not your family. Getting access can mean months of correspondence, court orders, and in some cases assets that are simply gone for good.
Cryptocurrency is its own category of risk here. Unlike a bank account, a self-custody crypto wallet has no institution to call. If the private keys are lost and nobody besides you knew where or how they were stored, that asset does not go into probate, it disappears permanently. The same is true for any account protected by two factor authentication tied only to your phone, once that phone is gone or locked, so is the account behind it.
What Actually Protects Your Family
None of this requires becoming a technology expert. The most reliable protection combines three things working together: the platform tools themselves, your legal documents, and a private inventory your family can actually find.
Start with the legacy tools most major platforms already offer. Google’s Inactive Account Manager and Apple’s Legacy Contact let you decide in advance what happens to those accounts, and because online tools sit at the top of RUFADAA’s hierarchy, setting these up correctly is often the single most effective step you can take.
Next, make sure your will, trust, or power of attorney explicitly authorizes your fiduciary to access and manage your digital assets, including private communications if that’s your intention. Generic language about “personal property” typically will not satisfy this requirement. It needs to speak to digital assets specifically.
Finally, build a private, secure inventory of what actually exists, financial accounts, email, cloud storage, social media, cryptocurrency wallets, domain names, and any online business tools, along with instructions for how your executor should proceed. This does not belong inside the will itself, since a will can become a public record during probate. A password manager or secure digital vault, referenced in your estate documents but stored separately, keeps this information both accessible to the right person and protected from everyone else.
If You Run a Business, This Matters Even More
For business owners, digital assets are not just sentimental, they can be operational. Customer records, e-commerce platforms, cloud based financial systems, and domain names often determine whether a business can keep running at all during a transition. If you have not specifically addressed who can access these systems and how, a business you built over years could stall out at exactly the moment your family needs it to keep generating income.
The Bottom Line
Your digital life has real value, financial and personal, and Illinois law does not assume your family can simply step in and handle it the way they would with a filing cabinet full of paperwork. A modern estate plan needs to name digital assets specifically, use the tools platforms already give you, and leave your family a clear, secure roadmap. It’s a conversation worth having now, while it’s simple, rather than leaving your family to sort it out during one of the hardest weeks of their lives.
About Tracy Ries
Tracy Ries is an estate planning and probate attorney at Bellas & Wachowski in Chicago, where she helps families build estate plans that reflect how people actually live today, including the digital accounts, photos, and online assets that traditional planning often leaves out. Tracy works with clients to make sure their wills, trusts, and powers of attorney give their loved ones clear, legal authority to manage their full digital life, not just their physical property. If your estate plan does not yet address your digital assets, schedule a consultation with Tracy Ries today at 800.825.9260 or visit bellas-wachowski.com.