To handle digital assets in your estate plan in Massachusetts, you need to do three things: use each provider’s own built-in legacy tool, grant your fiduciaries explicit written authority over digital assets in your will, trust, and power of attorney, and keep a secure inventory of accounts separate from those documents. Massachusetts is one of the last states without a digital assets fiduciary access law, which means your documents have to do work that statutes do elsewhere.
That last point changes the planning. In most states, a default law fills the gaps. Here, the gaps stay open unless you close them.
Why Is Massachusetts Different?
Nearly every other state has adopted some version of the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, known as RUFADAA. It gives executors, trustees, and agents a legal pathway to reach a person’s online accounts, and it tells providers when they must comply.
Massachusetts has not enacted it. Legislation has been filed session after session. The current bill, House No. 4639, would add a new Chapter 201G to the General Laws and was reported favorably out of the Judiciary Committee in October 2025. If it passes, it takes effect one year later. Until then, no Massachusetts statute obligates a provider to give your family access.
The practical consequence: when your personal representative contacts a technology company, the company’s terms of service govern, and those terms usually say the account is non-transferable and terminates at death. There is no state law to point to. Combined with the federal Stored Communications Act, which limits disclosure of private electronic communications, families often hit a wall.
What Counts as a Digital Asset?
Broader than most people assume. It helps to sort them into categories, because they are handled differently.
- Assets with real financial value. Cryptocurrency, online brokerage accounts, domain names, monetized channels, e-commerce stores, advertising revenue accounts, and loyalty or airline points.
- Assets with sentimental value. Photo libraries, video archives, email history, and social media accounts.
- Access-only assets. Password managers, cloud storage, and two-factor authentication apps. These have no value themselves but control access to everything else.
- Licensed content. Purchased music, films, and ebooks. These are usually licenses that end at death and cannot be inherited, regardless of what you paid.
The distinction matters because you can transfer ownership of the first group. For the second and third, what you are really transferring is access.
What Should I Actually Do First?
Use the tools the providers already give you. Under the pending Massachusetts bill, and under the law in other states, a provider’s online tool overrides instructions in a will. Even without the statute, these tools work today because they are contractual and the company honors them.
The main ones:
- Google Inactive Account Manager. Names people to receive selected data after a period of inactivity.
- Apple Legacy Contact. Names someone who can request access to your iCloud data with a death certificate and an access key.
- Facebook and Instagram Legacy Contact. Lets someone memorialize or manage the profile.
- Microsoft, Dropbox, and most password managers offer emergency access or recovery designations.
Setting these up takes under an hour and does more for your family than any paragraph in a will.
What Language Belongs in My Documents?
Because Massachusetts has no default statute, silence in your documents is a real problem. Generic authority to manage “property” is often read narrowly by providers.
Your plan should include:
- Explicit digital asset authority in your will, granting your personal representative power over digital assets including the content of electronic communications.
- The same authority in your trust, so your successor trustee can act on trust-held digital assets.
- The same authority in your durable power of attorney, which matters during incapacity rather than after death.
- Express consent to disclosure of content. This specific consent language is what federal law looks for, and omitting it is the most common drafting gap.
- Instructions on what you want done, such as which accounts to memorialize, which to delete, and which contain material you want preserved for family.
Our estate planning practice includes this language as standard, because a plan drafted a decade ago almost certainly does not have it.
How Do I Handle the Inventory and Passwords?
Never put passwords in your will. A will becomes a public court record when it is filed for probate, so anything in it is available to anyone who asks.
A better approach:
- Use a password manager and designate an emergency contact within it.
- Keep a written inventory listing the account, the provider, and its purpose, without the credentials.
- Store the master credential with your attorney, in a safe deposit box, or in a sealed document referenced by your plan.
- Update it annually. An inventory from four years ago is close to useless.
For anything with real value, note the location and the recovery method. Self-custodied cryptocurrency is the extreme case: if nobody can find the seed phrase, the asset is gone permanently, and no court order can recover it.
What Happens If I Do Nothing?
The realistic outcomes are worth stating plainly:
- Accounts get locked and eventually deleted, along with photos and correspondence.
- Your family petitions the Probate and Family Court for an order, which costs time and money and may still not persuade the provider.
- Financial digital assets go unclaimed because nobody knew they existed.
- Subscriptions keep billing the estate for months.
- Someone uses your credentials anyway, which may violate federal computer access law even with good intentions.
That last risk is underappreciated. A well-meaning spouse logging into an account with a shared password may technically be exceeding authorized access. Explicit written authority protects them. If probate becomes necessary, our probate practice handles these petitions.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can my executor just log into my accounts with my password?
It is risky. Without written authority, doing so may violate the provider’s terms and federal computer access law, even for a spouse.
Do my iTunes movies and Kindle books pass to my heirs?
Generally no. Those are personal licenses that end at death, not property you own.
Should I list my crypto wallet in my will?
List that it exists. Never include the seed phrase or private key, because the will becomes a public record.
Will the Massachusetts bill fix this if it passes?
It would give fiduciaries a legal pathway and require provider cooperation. It would not replace the need for explicit authority and a current inventory.
Get the Access Problem Solved Before It Becomes Your Family’s Problem
Digital assets are the part of the estate where good intentions fail most often, because access cannot be recreated after the fact. Massachusetts law is not going to rescue a plan that says nothing, at least not yet.
To add digital asset authority to your will, trust, and power of attorney, contact us to schedule an estate planning consultation. We help families throughout Essex County and the Merrimack Valley, including Andover, North Andover, Middleton, Wilmington, and Reading.