Your heirs can’t claim accounts they don’t know about, and with paperless statements, the only record they could find sits behind your password. Keep every account in a password manager, turn on its emergency access for someone you trust, and have your will authorize your executor to open your email and other digital accounts.
Skip those steps, and an old brokerage account can end up with the state. Its statements go to an inbox nobody can open, and after three to seven years without contact in most states, the firm turns the account over as unclaimed property. The shares get sold, and heirs who find the claim later typically receive the cash value from the day it changed hands, not the growth since.
Banks and brokerages ask your executor for a death certificate and estate papers, not your login. The hard part is learning the account exists, and your executor has no right to open the inbox that would say so.
Nearly every email provider’s terms bar anyone else from signing in as you. Without your written consent, the digital-assets law most states have adopted entitles your executor to a log of who you exchanged emails with and when, not the messages themselves.
The fix has three layers.
- Make the password manager your inventory, since a paper list goes stale the first time you change a login. Include every financial and income account, the email each one uses, your two-factor recovery codes, and where your crypto recovery phrases are kept. In Bitwarden’s paid plans or LastPass, emergency access lets a person you name into your vault unless you deny the request within a waiting period you set.
- Name legacy contacts at Google and Apple. Google’s Inactive Account Manager sends the people you pick a link to your data after your account sits idle for a period you set. Apple lets a Legacy Contact open your photos, messages, and files with an access key and a death certificate. Under the digital-assets law, these settings outrank your will, so make them match it.
- Add a clause to your will and power of attorney that expressly authorizes access to your digital assets, including your email’s content. Keep the passwords out of the will itself, since a will that goes through probate becomes a public record.
If your executor would need your unlocked phone to list what you own, the plan isn’t finished.
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