Your grandfather's estate was a shape you could walk around: land, cattle, a house, a metal box of papers. Yours is different. A growing share of what you own, and almost everything you have recorded about your life,...
Your grandfather's estate was a shape you could walk around: land, cattle, a house, a metal box of papers. Yours is different. A growing share of what you own, and almost everything you have recorded about your life, now sits behind screens: the mobile money balance, the banking app, the email account that can reset every other account, ten years of family photos, the business page with its customer list, a domain name, maybe some crypto.
None of it appears in a traditional will template. Almost all of it dies with your PIN.
That is the modern gap in estate planning. Families that would never leave land untitled leave their entire digital layer locked behind passwords nobody else holds. This piece closes the gap with a system you can build in one hour: the digital inventory, the sealed access note, the trusted-contact designations, and the SIM and next-of-kin records. First, the evidence that this problem is real money, not theory.
Start with the starkest number available. By 2023, the Bank of Uganda was holding an estimated UGX 70 billion from dormant mobile money accounts, and had paid out only about UGX 268.7 million in the two years since it began regulating the platforms, according to Business Times Uganda. Under the National Payment Systems Act 2020, a wallet inactive for nine months is classified dormant; continued inactivity leads to closure and the balance is transferred to the central bank, where claimants have seven years before the money moves to the Consolidated Fund. A meaningful share of those dormant balances belonged to people who died, whose families either did not know the money existed or could not complete the claim.
Why can families not just collect? Because being next of kin is not the same as being entitled. The Uganda Bankers' Association advisory is explicit: a next of kin cannot simply withdraw a deceased person's funds; access requires probate or letters of administration from court. Telecoms apply the same standard. Reporting on Uganda's rules for SIM transfer and accessing money of the dead describes what MTN and Airtel require before releasing a deceased subscriber's line and wallet: letters of administration processed through the Administrator General, a death certificate, and identification of the estate manager, with Airtel likewise requiring letters of administration and the claimant's national ID.
Follow the chain and you see how a balance gets orphaned. The family does not know which SIMs the deceased held, or what the wallets contained. The court process takes months while the nine-month dormancy clock runs. The SIM itself gets recycled by the telecom after prolonged inactivity, taking with it the number that banks, apps, and OTP verifications were anchored to. A dead SIM can strand far more than its own wallet: it can lock the family out of every account that used that number for verification.
An honest caveat: the rules and figures above are Uganda-specific and change; check current telecom and Bank of Uganda procedures when you act. But the structural lesson is global. Every country's platforms freeze on death, and every family that never made an inventory starts the recovery from zero.
Estate attorney Mary Beth Fanelli's core teaching in Leaving a Legacy of Love is that the kindest document you leave is practical: one findable file holding the will, the account list, the contacts, and the instructions, so your executor is not, in her image, drifting on the ocean with no compass. Written a generation ago, her file was paper. Extending it to the digital layer is the same discipline applied to new assets, and regulators now say so directly: the California DFPI lists safeguarding your digital estate as one of its five steps to building generational wealth, alongside wills and insurance.
Concretely, the digital estate splits into three categories, and it helps to see them together:
| Category | Examples | What is lost without access | |---|---|---| | Money | Mobile money wallets, bank and investment apps, PayPal or Wise, crypto wallets, unpaid invoices in email | The balances themselves, plus proof they exist | | Keys | Email accounts, phone unlock codes, SIM numbers, password managers, two-factor apps | The ability to recover everything else | | Memory and identity | Photo libraries, social accounts, WhatsApp history, domain names, business pages, subscriber lists | The family archive, and income tied to audience or brand |
The keys row is the one people miss. Your primary email and your phone number are master keys: nearly every account can be reset through them. Protect those two, and much of the rest is recoverable. Lose both, and even known balances can become unreachable.
1. The digital inventory (30 minutes). One document listing every account that matters: institution or platform, the identifier (phone number, email, username), and what it holds. No passwords in this document. Include every SIM you own and what is registered to it, every bank and wallet, email accounts, the password manager if you use one, social and business accounts, domains, and any crypto with the wallet type. The inventory alone solves the commonest failure, which is that the family never knew the asset existed. Store it in the family vault beside the will and titles.
2. The sealed access note (15 minutes). A separate, sealed record of the actual keys: phone unlock code, password manager master password, email password, and for crypto the location of the seed phrase, never the phrase itself in the same envelope as its location. Seal it physically, or store it digitally with a mechanism the vault controls. Tell two people it exists and where. Refresh it when the master passwords change, which is why a password manager helps: one master key to update instead of forty.
3. The trusted-contact designations (10 minutes). Most major platforms now have a built-in inheritance mechanism, and almost nobody activates it: Google's Inactive Account Manager, Apple's Legacy Contact, Facebook's legacy contact settings. Turn them on and name your person. These take minutes and work without any court process. Where a platform offers nothing, your inventory plus the legal grant is the fallback.
4. The SIM and next-of-kin records (5 minutes). Confirm each SIM is registered in your correct name with your national ID, and record the details in the inventory. Update next-of-kin and nominee records at your bank, NSSF or pension fund, SACCO, and insurer so they match your actual intentions; the Uganda Bankers' Association advisory notes next of kin records help the institution trace family, even though payout still follows the legal grant. Tell your family plainly which numbers carry money, so no SIM with a wallet is quietly abandoned to the dormancy clock.
Do not put passwords in your will. A will that goes through probate becomes a public court record, read by clerks, relatives, and objectors. A will should say who receives the digital assets; the sealed note, stored separately, says how to reach them. The same logic applies to listing account numbers with balances in documents that many relatives will handle.
Do not rely on one person's memory. The spouse who knows everything can die in the same accident. Two people, two locations.
Do not share living passwords casually. The goal is access after death or incapacity, not shared access now. Mechanisms that release on death, sealed physical notes, legacy-contact features, keep the boundary clean, protect you from fraud today, and protect your helpers from accusations later, since using a deceased person's PIN without a grant is legally unauthorized even with good intentions.
Do not let perfect security prevent any plan. Yes, a sealed envelope can be stolen. A locked phone with no plan is a guaranteed loss; a sealed note in a family vault is a small, managed risk. Choose the managed risk.
Block one hour this week. Build the digital inventory in the family vault, write and seal the access note, switch on legacy contacts for your email, phone, and main social accounts, and confirm your SIM registrations and next-of-kin records. Then tell two trusted people where the inventory lives. Your PINs are property. Treat them with the same seriousness as a land title, because for many families they now guard more value than one.
This piece did its job if, one hour from reading it, your family could find every account you own without guessing a single password.