Digital assets and online accounts are the photos, emails, cryptocurrency, loyalty points, domain names, social media profiles, and cloud-stored files you own or control online. In a Florida estate plan, they are governed largely by the Florida Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (Chapter 740, Florida Statutes), which lets you grant your personal representative, trustee, or agent legal authority to access them after death or incapacity. Without explicit planning, your loved ones may be locked out by federal privacy law and a provider’s terms of service.
I have sat across the table from too many surviving spouses and adult stepchildren who knew exactly where the money was supposed to be and still could not get to it. The account existed. The password did not. And the company on the other end of the screen had no legal reason to take their word for anything. That gap is preventable, and in a blended family it is not just an inconvenience, it is often where a fight starts.
What counts as a digital asset under Florida law
Florida’s version of the uniform act defines a digital asset broadly as an electronic record in which an individual has a right or interest. That is wider than most people assume. It is not only your Bitcoin wallet. It includes the everyday accounts that quietly hold value, sentiment, or access to the rest of your life.
- Financial and quasi-financial accounts: cryptocurrency, brokerage logins, PayPal, Venmo, online-only banks, and rewards programs with cash value.
- Sentimental and irreplaceable files: photos and videos in iCloud or Google Photos, family correspondence, scanned documents.
- Income-producing or business property: domain names, a monetized YouTube or social channel, an Etsy or Amazon seller account, freelance platforms.
- Identity and communication hubs: email, which is frequently the master key because password resets for everything else flow through it.
- Subscriptions and recurring charges: often overlooked, these keep draining the estate until someone shuts them off.
One important distinction: the law separates the asset itself from the account that holds it. Your fiduciary may have rights to the underlying funds even when the platform restricts access to the login. The cleaner your planning, the less that distinction has to be litigated.
Why federal law, not just your will, controls the outcome
Here is the surprise that catches most families. Two federal laws, the Stored Communications Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, make it unlawful for online providers to disclose the contents of communications without consent, and they expose anyone who logs in without authorization to liability. A provider that hands your Gmail to a grieving spouse without proper authority risks federal trouble. So it does not.
This is why simply writing “my husband gets everything” in a will is not enough for digital accounts. A general bequest does not, by itself, satisfy the consent the providers and the statute require. Florida’s Fiduciary Access act builds a three-tier order of priority that you should understand and use deliberately:
- An online tool offered by the provider itself (Google’s Inactive Account Manager, Facebook’s Legacy Contact, Apple’s Legacy Contact). If you complete one of these, it generally controls over your will.
- Your estate planning documents if no online tool exists or you have not used it. A will, trust, or durable power of attorney that expressly grants digital-asset authority becomes the governing instruction.
- The provider’s terms-of-service agreement as the default if you have done neither. That is the worst outcome, because the terms were written to protect the company, not your family.
The practical takeaway is sequencing. The platform’s built-in tool can quietly override the documents your attorney drafted. So your estate plan and your online settings have to point in the same direction, or the cheaper, automated setting wins.
The blended-family problem: access is not the same as inheritance
Around Palm Beach we draft a lot of plans for second marriages, and digital assets expose a tension that traditional assets sometimes hide. Consider a common situation. A husband remarries; his new wife is the personal representative; his children from the first marriage are beneficiaries. His phone, his email, and his photo library hold decades of memories of his late first wife and the children’s childhood. Who gets access? Who decides what is preserved and what is deleted?
Florida law lets you name different people for different roles, and in blended families that flexibility is a gift. You can give your spouse authority over financial accounts while giving an adult child a copy of irreplaceable family photographs. You can authorize a fiduciary to access an account’s content while still directing that certain private messages never be disclosed. The point is that access is a separate decision from who inherits the value, and treating them as the same is how stepfamilies end up in probate court over a hard drive.
I encourage clients in second marriages to be explicit about three things: who may log in, what they may see, and what should be preserved or copied for the children before anything is closed. Vague instructions invite suspicion, and suspicion between a stepparent and stepchildren is expensive to unwind. A well-drafted trust is often the better vehicle here because it keeps these directions private and out of the public probate file. For the mechanics of structuring that kind of protection, the team at Morgan Legal’s trust practice walks families through the trade-offs in plain language.
Granting authority in your Florida documents
To make the Fiduciary Access act work for you, the authority has to be written into the right documents with the right language. Generic forms rarely do this well. Here is where the grant of power belongs:
- Last will and testament: authorize your personal representative to access, manage, and close digital accounts, including the content of electronic communications, citing Chapter 740 expressly. See our overview of Florida wills for how this fits the rest of the document.
- Revocable living trust: grant the trustee parallel authority over any digital assets titled in or controlled by the trust. This is also the most private route.
- Durable power of attorney: critical for incapacity, not just death. If you have a stroke and someone needs to pay bills and manage accounts, the agent needs digital authority while you are still living. A bare-bones power of attorney usually omits this.
Incapacity is the half of this people forget. Most attention goes to what happens when you die, but digital lockout during a long illness can be just as damaging, and an aging spouse may need help managing accounts for years. Coordinating these documents with the rest of an elder-law strategy matters; resources like this guide to elder law planning illustrate how incapacity and access intersect, and the same principles apply under Florida’s framework.
A practical Florida digital-asset checklist
Beyond the legal authority, the logistics decide whether your family spends an afternoon or a year sorting this out. I give clients a short, repeatable process.
- Make an inventory. List your accounts by category. You do not have to write passwords on it; you need a map so nothing is missed and no subscription quietly drains the estate.
- Use a password manager. A reputable manager with a documented emergency-access feature is the single best practical tool, because it solves the access problem without putting credentials in your will, which becomes a public record after probate.
- Set the providers’ legacy tools for your major accounts, and confirm they match your documents. Remember, the online tool can override the will.
- Handle cryptocurrency deliberately. If your fiduciary cannot find the private keys or seed phrase, the asset is simply gone. No court can recover it. Store recovery information securely and tell a trusted person where it lives.
- Keep credentials out of the will itself. Reference a separate, updatable memorandum or a password manager instead, so you can change a password without amending a legal document.
- Update after life changes. A new marriage, a divorce, a new business account. The inventory is only useful if it is current.
What happens in Florida probate without a plan
When someone dies without digital-asset authority in place, the personal representative often has to go back to the probate court for specific orders, and even then the providers may demand a court directive that names the account and the legal basis for disclosure. That means delay, legal fees, and sometimes a flat refusal that no amount of grief or paperwork overcomes. Family photos can be lost permanently. Cryptocurrency can be unrecoverable. Recurring charges can quietly erode the estate for months. Florida estate administration is already a process worth understanding before you need it, and you can read more on our Florida probate overview page. The Florida office at Morgan Legal’s estate planning group handles these administrations regularly and sees the same preventable bottlenecks repeat.
Digital assets are not an afterthought to a modern estate plan; for many families they are now the part most likely to cause a dispute or a loss. The fix is not complicated, but it has to be deliberate and it has to be coordinated across your will, trust, power of attorney, and the settings on the accounts themselves. If you live in Palm Beach or anywhere in Florida and your plan does not yet address your online life, that is worth correcting now. You can reach our office to start.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does my Florida will automatically give my executor access to my online accounts?
Not reliably. Federal privacy laws like the Stored Communications Act prevent providers from disclosing account contents without proper consent, and a general bequest does not satisfy that. Your will, trust, or power of attorney must expressly grant digital-asset authority under Florida’s Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (Chapter 740), and even then a provider’s own legacy tool can override the will if you completed one.
What is the Florida Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act?
It is Chapter 740 of the Florida Statutes, Florida’s adoption of the uniform act on digital assets. It lets you authorize your personal representative, trustee, or agent under a power of attorney to access, manage, and close your digital accounts, and it sets a priority order: a provider’s online tool first, then your estate planning documents, then the provider’s terms of service as the default.
How should a blended family handle digital assets differently?
Separate the question of access from the question of inheritance. Florida law lets you name different people for different roles, so a surviving spouse can manage financial accounts while an adult child receives copies of irreplaceable family photos. Spell out who may log in, what they may view, and what should be preserved before any account is closed. A revocable trust keeps these directions private and out of the public probate record.
What happens to my cryptocurrency if I die without sharing access?
It is typically lost permanently. Cryptocurrency requires the private keys or seed phrase, and no court, exchange, or provider can recover them if your fiduciary cannot locate them. You should store recovery information securely, document where it is kept, and grant a trusted fiduciary the authority and the means to reach it.
Should I put my passwords in my will?
No. A will generally becomes a public record once it is admitted to probate, so passwords in it are exposed and quickly outdated. Instead, use a reputable password manager with an emergency-access feature, or reference a separate, updatable memorandum, and grant the legal authority to access accounts within the will, trust, or power of attorney itself.
For more on our Florida practice, see our overview of powers of attorney in Florida. Morgan Legal Group's affiliated New York office also handles New York elder law.