ORLANDO, Fla. – This week on “Black Men Sundays,” host Corie Murray shares part two of his interview with Certified Executor Advisor David Edey, who joined the show to give some great advice on getting your estate planning done before it’s too late.
The issue was raised of managing one’s online identities after death, with Corie and Edey going over the need to keep tabs on business and personal online accounts, as well as to protect one’s intellectual property.
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“You need to take inventory of all those logins and passwords, and if you’re running a business, you hopefully keep them separate. You’ve got your personal logins and passwords, and you’ve got your business logins and passwords, because if something was to happen and if they’re both intertwined and nobody knows how they intertwine and they’re part of the income that’s coming into the home, then that could easily be affected,” Edey said.
Edey described how the loss of access to online accounts needed in order to run a business could eventually lead to a cutoff of money coming into the home, for example. Aside from keeping all those accounts separate though, Edey said that a simple planning measure to get done now is to keep a list of such information.
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“There’s a lot of digital clouds, software vaults that you could put them in, but then again, if you’re going to do that, you have to make sure that the executor knows how to access them, or somebody else knows how to access them,” Edey said.
Beyond that, what about the things in your online accounts or on your devices that you’d rather leave private after death? That’s something which your executor is going to need to know about, too.
“You want to make sure that you have some sort of process that the executor knows what to do, how to shut them down. In my book, I’ve got a whole chapter on that, because each social media company has its own protocol in terms of how to shut down,” Edey said. “(...) If something was to happen, you’ve got that list and it will make it easier for the executor or someone you trust. Maybe you’re going to trust the executor with the estate and you have someone who’s just going to handle all the passwords, but the executor will hand it to them or something like that, but you’ve got to be cognizant of that because we do so much online and, you know, it’s everything that we do every day and we want to make sure that we don’t open ourselves up to, well, you’re not going to be here, but opening up the family to some sort of online theft.”
Hear the interview and more in Season 5, Episode 15 of “Black Men Sundays.”
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