Pub. 8 2017 Issue 1

Spring 2017 21 West Virginia Banker A Digital Legacy: What to Expect, How to Prepare By Susan Morgan, The newsLINK Group E veryone knows it’s a good idea to have a will; in this modern digital age, though, it has also become increasingly necessary to have a plan for handling digital estates after someone has died. That’s why estate planning has expanded in ways no one could have foreseen even a few years ago. The broad categories include: •Social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter •Online accounts and passwords for retail stores, banks, credit unions, and credit cards •Online photos and videos •Blogs There are times when people can manage without a team of people to help them. This isn’t one of them. After all, the issues involved in handling a digital legacy are at the forefront of many of the changes going on today. People should not try to navigate these waters on their own. Providing good advice to a bank’s customers is a vital service, but the role of the bank is changing. The world has altered a great deal even when you compare it to how things were as recently as 20 years ago. Bankers are just like the people in every other business. They need to adapt to the future and fill developing needs. The next few years are bound to continue changing many things we take for granted. Bankers who offer estate services should be key players in every aspect of estate planning. That means the digital ones, too. As a society, we are covering new ground, and as a result, bank customers need a team of experts, including bankers and lawyers, who have the training and developed instincts to safeguard every aspect of an estate. Planning is particularly important because it isn’t like there is a one-size- fits-all solution. Every company has its own concerns about privacy and its own rules for handling information. Since the whole idea is to delegate important decisions to trusted individuals, enabling them to tie up loose ends, that means someone needs to have Power of Attorney for managing assets. In some cases, though, it may also be necessary to appoint a Digital Executor whose duties are tied specifically to deleting or distributing online assets; for example, a bank customer may have a trusted individual who is in charge of almost every aspect of an estate