Digital Legacy Planning: The Checklist Most People Never Finish

September 22, 2026 · 9 min read

Digital legacy planning has a reputation problem. It sounds like a weekend project with a spreadsheet, and most people who start one abandon it somewhere around the third password. The abandonment is not laziness. It is that the usual advice front-loads the boring half and never explains which steps actually change what happens to the people you leave behind.

So here is the same checklist, reordered by how much difference each step makes. If you only ever do the first three, you will have covered most of what matters.

Step 1: Name a human before you name an account

Every other step on this list assumes somebody will eventually be standing in front of your laptop trying to do something. Decide who that is first. It does not have to be the person handling your finances, and often it should not be — the qualities you want are patience and discretion, not competence with paperwork.

Tell them. Out loud, while you are alive. A plan discovered in a drawer is a plan that arrives a week too late. We wrote separately about what a digital executor actually does and how to appoint one, including the awkward question of whether the role belongs in your will at all.

Step 2: Switch on the tools the platforms already gave you

This is the highest-value hour in the whole exercise, and it is the step most digital legacy planning guides bury at the bottom. The big platforms have built-in inheritance mechanisms. They are free, they take minutes, and unlike anything you write down, they are enforced by the company rather than depending on someone finding a note.

• Apple Legacy Contact — lets a named person request access to your iCloud data with a death certificate and an access key.
• Google Inactive Account Manager — the only one that fires automatically. After a period of inactivity you choose, it notifies people you nominate and can share or delete your data.
• Facebook and Instagram legacy contact — decides whether the profile is memorialised or removed, and who can manage it.
• Your password manager’s emergency access — usually the single most useful switch on this list, because it unlocks everything else.

Two of these are worth doing in detail rather than in a hurry: our walkthroughs cover setting up legacy contacts on Google, Apple and Facebook and Google Inactive Account Manager specifically, which behaves differently from the rest because it triggers on its own.

Step 3: Inventory by consequence, not by completeness

The instruction to “list all your accounts” is what kills most attempts. You have hundreds. Nobody needs your 2014 forum login. Sort instead by what breaks if nobody can get in:

1. Money that keeps moving — bank and brokerage logins, anything with a subscription billing your card, crypto wallets, payment apps holding a balance.
2. Identity keys — your primary email and your phone number. These two recover almost everything else, which is also why they are the two an executor most needs and most often cannot reach.
3. Things people will want — photos, messages, a domain, a manuscript, a business account.
4. Things people will want gone — and be honest here, because silence is an instruction too.

Four categories, maybe twenty accounts total. That is a finishable afternoon. If it helps to think of it as decluttering rather than estate admin, Swedish death cleaning applied to a digital life takes that angle.

Step 4: Understand what your will can and cannot do here

A will disposes of property. Much of your digital life is not property — it is a licence to use a service, governed by terms you agreed to and which usually say the licence ends with you. Your executor may have a clear legal right to the money in an account and no right at all to the emails in it.

The practical consequence: do not put passwords in a will. A will becomes a public document in many jurisdictions once probate is granted, and it is often read months later. Refer to a separate list instead, and keep the list somewhere with its own access control. We went through this in more depth in does your will cover your online accounts.

Step 5: Decide what gets said, and by whom

This is the step almost everyone skips, and the only one the people left behind actually remember. Accounts get closed either way. What does not happen by default is anyone hearing from you.

It does not need to be long. A paragraph to three people beats a novel to nobody. If the blank page is the obstacle, what to say in a final message and legacy letter templates and examples both exist to get you past the first sentence. If you would rather it arrive on its own schedule than sit in a folder waiting to be found, the ways to send messages after death compares the mechanisms honestly, including their failure modes.

The part nobody tells you: a plan has a shelf life

A digital legacy plan written once and never touched degrades quietly. Phone numbers change. Two-factor moves to a new device. The friend you named in 2021 is no longer the right person. Platforms rename their features. A plan that was accurate three years ago can fail in exactly the ways it was written to prevent, and nobody will discover the failure until it is too late to fix.

Put a recurring reminder in your calendar — annually is plenty — that says nothing more than “check the legacy list.” Ten minutes. Confirm the nominated people are still the right people, the recovery phone number is still yours, and anything time-triggered is still counting down from a date you would recognise.

If you have twenty minutes, not an afternoon

Do these three things and stop: turn on emergency access in your password manager and name one person. Turn on Google Inactive Account Manager. Tell that person, in a real conversation, that you have done it and roughly what you would want.

That is not a complete plan. It is, however, more than most people manage, and it covers the two scenarios that cause the most damage: nobody can get into anything, and nobody knew there was anything to get into. The spreadsheet can wait for a rainier weekend.