Your digital estate is everything you own or control that lives behind a screen: mobile money balances, banking and investment apps, email accounts, phone and SIM numbers, password managers, photo libraries, social and...
Your digital estate is everything you own or control that lives behind a screen: mobile money balances, banking and investment apps, email accounts, phone and SIM numbers, password managers, photo libraries, social and business accounts, domain names, crypto. It is property in every sense that matters, and unlike land or a metal box of papers, almost all of it becomes unreachable at death unless you planned access. As the corpus puts it, your grandfather's estate was a shape you could walk around; yours dies with your PIN.
Passwords Are Property sorts the digital estate into three categories, and the sorting is the useful part. Money: wallets, bank apps, crypto, unpaid invoices sitting in email. Keys: the email account and phone number through which nearly every other account can be reset. Memory and identity: the photo archive, the WhatsApp history, the business page with its customer list. The keys row is the one families miss. Protect the primary email and the phone number and much of the rest is recoverable; lose both and even known balances can become unreachable. The stakes are not theoretical. The same article records the Bank of Uganda holding an estimated UGX 70 billion from dormant mobile money wallets by 2023, much of it orphaned by deaths, and Digital Money Hygiene shows how a recycled SIM can strand every account that used that number for verification.
The common misunderstanding is to solve this by putting passwords in the will. Do not. A will that goes through probate becomes a public court record, read by clerks, relatives, and objectors. The corpus's rule is a clean split: the will says who receives the digital assets; a sealed access note, stored separately in the family vault, says how to reach them. The related error is relying on one person's memory, and the corpus's answer is equally short: two people, two locations, because the spouse who knows everything can die in the same accident.
The whole plan is a one-hour build with four artifacts: a digital inventory listing every account and what it holds, with no passwords in it; the sealed access note holding the actual keys; trusted-contact designations switched on where platforms offer them, such as Google's Inactive Account Manager, Apple's Legacy Contact, and Facebook's legacy contact; and clean SIM and next-of-kin records. Where a platform offers no inheritance mechanism, the inventory plus the legal grant is the fallback, and the platform's or operator's own bereavement process is the authority on current requirements, as The First Week After a Death assumes for every institution.
One action: block one hour this week and build the digital inventory, one document your family could use to find every account you own without guessing a single password. File it in the vault beside the will and the titles, and tell two trusted people it exists.