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Ensuring That Your Beneficiaries Benefit Fully From Your Online Assets

When you sit down to consider who should benefit in the event of your death, you may think about who should receive your home or perhaps your grandfather clock, but you may not give much thought to your online assets.

Nowadays, many people have a lot stored in the internet cloud, and with cloud computing becoming an ever more important feature of our lives, that is only set to rise. What you store on the internet may be trivial, such as gossip on your Facebook page. Alternatively, it may have sentimental value if you have stored photographs on flickr or Apple’s iCloud. Perhaps most significantly, it may be that you have online banking of which there is no paper trace at all among your papers at home.

When you draw up a will, therefore, you should consider both alerting your potential executors and beneficiaries to the existence of your online assets - what you have and where it is - and also providing them with the relevant login and password details. You will want to keep all of that secret and confidential during your lifetime to avoid it falling into the wrong hands, and you should therefore guard that information carefully.

Your solicitor can be trusted with a sealed envelope containing those details. Alternatively, there are some online sites where you can keep that information, such as croak.com.

It is important to give these matters some thought when preparing your will. Wills become out of date and lose their relevance over time. You may, for example, find that your family grows if you have children or grandchildren, or shrinks if some of your ancestors die before you. Your marital status may change for the better or perhaps for the worse. As well as keeping an eye on all of that, you should ensure that your statement of your online position remains as up to date as possible, and you should therefore revisit it at regular and manageable intervals.

If you have any queries regarding your will and online assets, please call Stuart Allen on 01935 846117 or e-mail s.allen@battens.co.uk.

Created: 08 November 2011