Digital Assets and Online Accounts in Your Florida Estate Plan

Digital assets in your Florida estate plan are the online accounts, files, and electronically stored property you own or control: email, cloud storage, social media, cryptocurrency, domain names, photo libraries, loyalty points, and any account secured by a username and password. Under Florida law, your personal representative or agent does not automatically gain access to these accounts when you die or become incapacitated. You have to grant that authority on purpose, in the right documents, or it may be lost.

That last point trips up a lot of people, and it trips up out-of-state property owners even more. If you live in New York or New Jersey and own a condo in Palm Beach, your will may be probated in two states, your fiduciary may be working from a thousand miles away, and your digital life may be governed by terms of service written in California. A coherent plan has to account for all of that.

What Counts as a Digital Asset

The term is broader than most clients assume. When I sit down with a new client and ask them to list their digital property, they usually name a checking account login and stop. Then we keep going, and the list grows fast.

• Financial and access accounts: online banking, brokerage, retirement portals, PayPal, Venmo, and bill-pay services.
• Cryptocurrency and digital tokens: Bitcoin, Ethereum, stablecoins, and NFTs held in exchanges or self-custody wallets.
• Communication and identity: email accounts, which are often the master key to resetting every other password.
• Content and media: cloud photo libraries, document storage, manuscripts, and creative files.
• Social and reputational accounts: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X, and YouTube channels that may carry monetary or sentimental value.
• Business and revenue assets: domain names, websites, e-commerce stores, and monetized accounts.
• Loyalty and rewards: airline miles and hotel points, some of which transfer at death and some of which do not.

Two distinctions matter here. First, the difference between the asset and the device that holds it. The phone in your pocket is tangible personal property that passes through your will like a watch or a car. The encrypted data on it is something else entirely. Second, the difference between an asset with real economic value, like a crypto wallet, and an asset with mostly sentimental value, like twenty years of family photos. Both deserve planning, but they raise different legal questions.

How Florida Law Handles Digital Assets: RUFADAA

Florida adopted the Florida Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, found in Chapter 740 of the Florida Statutes. It is Florida’s version of the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, often shortened to RUFADAA, which most states have now enacted in some form. The statute creates an orderly system for deciding who may access a person’s digital assets and how.

Chapter 740 sets up what attorneys call a three-tier priority system. Understanding the order is the whole game.

1. The online tool controls first. If the platform offers a built-in feature for naming someone to manage or inherit an account, your choice there governs. Google’s Inactive Account Manager and Facebook’s Legacy Contact are the common examples. A direction you set in one of these tools overrides what your will says.
2. Your estate planning documents control next. If you have not used an online tool, your will, trust, power of attorney, or other governing instrument decides whether your fiduciary may access the account. This is why the language in those documents matters so much.
3. The terms-of-service agreement controls last. If you have neither used an online tool nor addressed digital assets in your documents, the provider’s terms of service apply by default, and those terms are frequently restrictive or silent on death.

The statute also draws a line between the content of electronic communications, meaning the actual text of your emails and messages, and the catalogue, meaning the metadata such as who you emailed and when. Florida law lets a fiduciary reach the catalogue more readily than the content. To get at the substance of private communications, the law generally requires that you have given specific consent, because federal privacy statutes like the Stored Communications Act sit in the background and limit what providers may disclose.

Why Out-of-State and Dual-State Owners Face Extra Complications

For the snowbirds and dual-state families I work with in Palm Beach, digital assets add a layer to an already layered situation. Consider a retiree who keeps a primary residence in New York and a winter home here in Florida. A few things can go sideways.

The first is the residency-and-domicile question. Where you are domiciled drives which state’s law primarily governs your estate. If you intend to be a Florida domiciliary for tax and homestead reasons, your estate plan should be built on Florida law, including Chapter 740. But your fiduciary may still be administering New York real estate through ancillary proceedings, and your online accounts may need to be addressed in both forums. Clean drafting keeps these threads from tangling.

The second is the access-and-distance problem. A personal representative working remotely cannot just walk into your house and find your password notebook in a desk drawer. They need a documented, lawful path to your accounts, which makes a well-drafted plan more important, not less, when the family is spread across state lines.

The third is coordination with your home-state documents. If you signed a power of attorney in another state years ago, it may say nothing about digital assets, because the law was newer then. We frequently update or supplement those documents so that a Florida agent has clear statutory authority under Chapter 740.

Families balancing assets and care concerns across two states sometimes need elder-law tools layered on top of the estate plan. Our colleagues handle this kind of cross-border work regularly; for the New York side of a dual-state situation, Morgan Legal’s team coordinates with the Florida plan so nothing falls through the gap between jurisdictions.

How to Build Digital Assets Into Your Florida Plan

A workable approach has four moving parts. None of them is complicated on its own; the value is in doing all four and keeping them current.

1. Take Inventory, But Keep Passwords Separate

Make a written or digital inventory of your accounts. Do not, however, embed live passwords inside your will. A will becomes a public record once it is admitted to probate in Florida, and you do not want your credentials sitting in the county court file. Instead, list the accounts in the inventory and store the actual passwords in a reputable password manager or a sealed instruction letter that your fiduciary can reach. Update the inventory at least once a year, because accounts change constantly.

2. Add Explicit Digital-Asset Authority to Your Documents

Your will, revocable trust, and durable power of attorney should each contain language that expressly grants your fiduciary authority over digital assets and, critically, consent to access the content of your electronic communications. Without that specific consent language tied to Chapter 740, a provider can lawfully refuse to hand over your emails even to a duly appointed personal representative. This is the single most common defect I see in older documents.

3. Use the Platforms’ Own Legacy Tools

Because online tools sit at the top of the priority order, set them up while you can. Configure Google’s Inactive Account Manager. Name a Facebook Legacy Contact. Just make sure these designations agree with your estate plan rather than contradicting it, since they win any conflict.

4. Plan Crypto Carefully and Separately

Cryptocurrency deserves its own paragraph. If your private keys or seed phrase are lost, the assets are gone, with no bank to call and no recovery process. Your plan should explain to a trusted fiduciary how the wallet is structured and where the keys are secured, without exposing them in a public document. For larger holdings, multi-signature arrangements and hardware-wallet custody instructions are worth discussing with counsel.

Don’t Forget Incapacity, Not Just Death

Much of the conversation about digital assets focuses on death, but incapacity is the more frequent trigger. If you have a stroke and your spouse needs to pay your bills, cancel a recurring subscription, or reach a brokerage account, a durable power of attorney with proper digital-asset language under Chapter 740 lets your agent act. A power of attorney that predates the digital-assets statute, or that omits the right consent language, can leave your family locked out at the worst possible moment. Reviewing your power of attorney is often the highest-value, lowest-cost fix in this whole area.

For families also weighing long-term care costs, the digital-asset plan should sit alongside benefits planning. A is a good example of a tool that interacts with your fiduciary authorities, since the trustee will need lawful access to manage online financial accounts held by the trust.

Bringing It Together

Digital assets are not a niche add-on anymore. They are woven through nearly every modern estate, and Florida’s Chapter 740 gives you the legal scaffolding to plan for them if you use it deliberately. For out-of-state and dual-state property owners, the stakes are higher because distance and multiple jurisdictions amplify every gap. The fix is straightforward: inventory your accounts, grant explicit authority in current documents, use the platforms’ legacy tools, and handle crypto with special care.

If you own property in Palm Beach and want your digital life accounted for properly, our Florida team can help you align your will, trust, and powers of attorney, and coordinate with counsel in your home state. You can review our or contact us to start the conversation. If probate is already on the horizon, our overview of Florida probate walks through what a personal representative faces.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does my Florida will give my executor access to my email and online accounts?

Not automatically. Under Florida’s Chapter 740 (the Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act), your personal representative needs specific authority and, for the content of private communications, your explicit consent in the document. A will that does not mention digital assets or grant that consent can leave your fiduciary unable to reach your accounts, because federal privacy law lets providers refuse access by default.

What happens if I set up Google's Inactive Account Manager but my will says something different?

The online tool wins. Florida’s three-tier priority system places a provider’s built-in legacy tool above your estate planning documents. If you used Google’s Inactive Account Manager or Facebook’s Legacy Contact, that direction controls, so make sure those settings agree with your will and trust rather than contradicting them.

I live out of state but own a condo in Palm Beach. Whose law governs my digital assets?

It depends largely on your domicile and where each asset and proceeding is administered. If you are domiciled in Florida, Chapter 740 generally governs your fiduciary’s access. But a remote personal representative may also handle home-state property through ancillary proceedings, so your documents in both states should grant clear, consistent digital-asset authority. Coordinating Florida and home-state counsel prevents gaps.

Should I write my passwords into my estate planning documents?

No. A will becomes a public record once admitted to probate in Florida, so passwords in it are exposed. Instead, list accounts in a private inventory, store live credentials in a reputable password manager or a sealed instruction letter your fiduciary can reach, and keep that inventory updated at least annually.

How should cryptocurrency be handled in a Florida estate plan?

With special care. If the private keys or seed phrase are lost, the cryptocurrency is unrecoverable. Your plan should tell a trusted fiduciary how the wallet is structured and where keys are secured without exposing them in any public document. For larger holdings, discuss hardware-wallet custody and multi-signature arrangements with your attorney.