Digital Assets and Online Accounts in Your Florida Estate Plan

A digital asset is any electronic record you own or control—from cryptocurrency and brokerage logins to email, cloud storage, domain names, and loyalty points. In a Florida estate plan, “digital assets” also covers the legal right of your executor, trustee, or agent to access those accounts after you die or become incapacitated. Florida governs that access through the Florida Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, Chapter 740 of the Florida Statutes, which means the language in your will, trust, and power of attorney now controls whether your family can reach this property at all.

I have sat across the table from too many surviving spouses and adult children who assumed that “next of kin” was enough. It is not. A platform’s terms-of-service agreement and federal privacy law can lock out even a properly appointed personal representative if the estate plan is silent. For physicians, founders, and other professionals whose wealth and identity increasingly live online, that silence is a planning failure waiting to surface at the worst possible moment.

Why Digital Assets Need Their Own Planning Conversation

Traditional estate planning was built around tangible things—real property, bank accounts you could subpoena, paper certificates. Digital property breaks that model in three ways.

First, you often do not “own” the asset the way you think. You own the contents of your email, but the account itself is licensed to you under a terms-of-service agreement. That distinction decides what a fiduciary can legally touch.

Second, two federal laws sit on top of everything: the Stored Communications Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Custodians like Google, Apple, and Coinbase point to these statutes to refuse access when a will does not grant it explicitly. A grieving family without the right paperwork is treated, legally, like a stranger logging into someone else’s account.

Third, some of this property has no custodian at all. Self-custodied cryptocurrency held in a hardware wallet answers to no company. If your heirs do not have the seed phrase, the coins are gone—no court order recovers them. I have watched seven-figure wallets become unrecoverable because the only copy of a passphrase died with its owner.

The Categories Most Florida Professionals Overlook

• Financial and investment accounts: cryptocurrency, brokerage logins, payment apps (PayPal, Venmo, Zelle), and online banking that has no paper trail.
• Business-critical assets: domain names, websites, client portals, practice-management or EHR logins, and online intellectual property. For a physician or solo practitioner, losing the domain or patient portal can stall the entire practice’s wind-down or sale.
• Communications and data: email, text and photo archives, and cloud storage—often the master key, because password resets for everything else route back to the inbox.
• Income-producing accounts: monetized social media, e-commerce stores, ad revenue, and digital royalty streams.
• Stored value: airline miles, hotel points, and gift-card balances—small individually, meaningful in aggregate, and frequently forfeited on death.

How Florida Law Governs Fiduciary Access

Florida adopted the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, codified at Chapter 740, Florida Statutes. The Act sets a clear order of priority for who controls your digital assets and how a custodian must respond.

The Three-Tier Priority System

1. An online tool provided by the platform controls first. If a custodian offers its own designation feature—Google’s Inactive Account Manager or Apple’s Legacy Contact, for example—and you use it, that choice overrides your will. Section 740.04, Florida Statutes, gives this online tool top priority.
2. Your estate-planning documents control next. If you have not used an online tool, the directions in your will, trust, or power of attorney govern—but only if they specifically address digital assets.
3. The terms-of-service agreement controls last. If you are silent in both places, the platform’s own contract decides, and most default to restricting or deleting the account.

The practical lesson is blunt: a generic will that never mentions digital assets cedes control to a Silicon Valley contract you never read. The Act also distinguishes between the content of electronic communications—the actual words in your emails, which carry heightened privacy protection—and the catalogue of communications, meaning the metadata of who you corresponded with and when. A fiduciary generally needs explicit, documented consent to reach content, while a catalogue is easier to obtain. Drafting that grants access to both, in plain statutory language, is what separates a plan that works from one that produces a denial letter.

The Documents That Actually Grant Access

Three instruments do the heavy lifting, and each needs digital-asset language tailored to it.

Your Will

Your will should name who receives your digital property and expressly authorize your personal representative to access, manage, distribute, and dispose of it—citing Chapter 740 and consenting to disclosure of both content and catalogue. Remember that the personal representative’s authority does not exist until the court issues letters of administration through Florida probate, which can take months. That delay is exactly why time-sensitive assets often belong outside the will.

Your Revocable Living Trust

A funded revocable trust is usually the better home for valuable or perishable digital assets, because the successor trustee can act immediately on incapacity or death without waiting for probate. For business-critical logins, a domain that auto-renews, or a brokerage account that needs monitoring, that speed matters. Pairing your will and trust so the digital-asset provisions are consistent across both prevents the gaps custodians love to exploit.

Your Durable Power of Attorney

This is the document people forget, and it covers the scenario more likely than death: incapacity. A Florida durable power of attorney must specifically grant your agent authority over digital assets and reference the statutory consent under Chapter 740, or banks and platforms will reject the agent’s request. Florida’s power-of-attorney statute, Chapter 709, requires certain powers to be expressly enumerated rather than implied—so a boilerplate form almost never reaches your online accounts.

Building a Workable Digital-Asset Inventory

Legal authority is only half the problem. Your fiduciary also needs to know what exists and how to reach it—without that information leaking into the wrong hands while you are alive.

Never list passwords in your will. A will becomes a public court record once filed, so anything inside it is exposed. Instead, build a separate, secured inventory and reference it in your plan.

1. Catalogue the accounts, not the credentials. List each asset, its custodian, and its approximate value or importance. Keep this current—digital footprints change far faster than wills.
2. Store credentials securely and separately. A reputable password manager with an emergency-access or legacy feature lets a trusted person request access after a waiting period. This is cleaner than a sticky note in a desk drawer and far safer than a will.
3. Handle crypto seed phrases with extreme care. Anyone with the seed phrase controls the wallet, so the recovery method must be both findable by your fiduciary and invisible to everyone else. Hardware solutions, split-key arrangements, and a bank safe-deposit box referenced in your trust are common approaches—document yours.
4. Activate the platform tools. Set up Google Inactive Account Manager, Apple Legacy Contact, and Facebook Legacy Contact now. Under Section 740.04 these override your will, so make sure they point to the same people your documents name—not an ex-spouse you forgot about.

Special Stakes for Physicians and Business Owners

If you run a practice or a company, your digital estate plan is also a business-continuity plan. Patient records governed by HIPAA, EHR and practice-management logins, the practice domain and email, merchant accounts, and professional licensing portals all have to transition cleanly so the practice can be wound down, sold, or transferred without violating regulatory duties. I generally recommend separating personal and professional digital assets in your planning so a successor or buyer can take over the business credentials without inheriting your private inbox—and so your family is not pulled into operational decisions they are not equipped to make.

Asset protection deserves attention too. High-earning professionals are familiar with shielding tangible wealth from creditors and lawsuits; the same instinct should extend to digital holdings, especially appreciating cryptocurrency. The structures that protect other assets—certain trusts, entity layering, and tools like a for those planning around long-term care—can be coordinated with how your digital property is titled and transferred. For a high-net-worth professional weighing incapacity and long-term-care exposure, integrating digital assets into broader strategy is not an afterthought; it is the difference between a plan that holds and one that unravels under pressure.

Common Mistakes I See in Miami

• Putting passwords in the will. It becomes public; it also goes stale before you die.
• Relying on a generic online form. Most do not include Chapter 740 consent language, so custodians deny access.
• Ignoring the power of attorney. Incapacity, not death, is the more common trigger—and the one boilerplate documents miss.
• Forgetting the crypto recovery method. No seed phrase, no coins, no exceptions. Courts cannot help.
• Letting online tools contradict the will. A Legacy Contact you set up years ago can quietly override your current estate plan.

Florida’s framework gives you real control over your digital legacy—but only if your documents claim it. Whether you keep everything in a will, a trust, or a coordinated set of instruments, the goal is the same: your fiduciary should be able to walk into a custodian’s process with clear statutory authority and a clear map of what you own. If you would like your existing plan reviewed for digital-asset gaps, or you are building one from scratch, our Florida team handles with this firmly in mind. You can also reach our Miami office to start the conversation.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can my Florida executor automatically access my email and online accounts after I die?

No. Being named personal representative does not by itself grant access. Under Florida’s Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (Chapter 740, Florida Statutes) and federal privacy laws, a custodian can refuse access unless your will, trust, or power of attorney expressly authorizes it and consents to disclosure. A platform’s own online tool, if you used one, can even override your will.

Should I list my passwords in my will?

No. A will becomes a public court record once filed for probate, so any credentials inside it are exposed, and passwords change long before they are needed. Instead, grant legal authority in your documents and store the actual credentials separately in a secure password manager with an emergency-access feature or in a referenced, protected inventory.

What happens to my cryptocurrency if I die without sharing the seed phrase?

If you self-custody crypto in a hardware or software wallet and no one can locate the seed phrase or recovery key, the assets are effectively lost. There is no custodian to compel and no court order that recovers them. Document a secure recovery method your fiduciary can find—through a trust, safe-deposit box, or split-key arrangement—without exposing it to others.

Does my Florida power of attorney cover my digital accounts?

Only if it says so explicitly. Florida’s power-of-attorney statute (Chapter 709) requires many powers to be specifically enumerated, and Chapter 740 requires consent language for digital access. A generic form almost never reaches your online accounts, so your agent could be blocked during incapacity unless the document was drafted to include digital-asset authority.

Is a trust better than a will for holding digital assets in Florida?

Often, yes, for valuable or time-sensitive assets. A funded revocable living trust lets your successor trustee act immediately on death or incapacity without waiting months for probate. That speed matters for auto-renewing domains, monitored brokerage accounts, and business logins. Many plans use both, with consistent digital-asset language across the will and trust.