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Save your family from a digital zombie attack!

Harvey Jones
by Lovemoney Staff Harvey Jones on 04 December 2011  |  Comments 8 comments

Don't make this mistake with your family's finances...

Save your family from a digital zombie attack!

You only live twice, James Bond author Ian Fleming wrote. Well, I’ve just discovered that you die twice as well. The first is your paper death, and the second is your digital death.

Digital death is quite a new phenomenon, so most of us simply aren’t prepared for it. It’s about time we were. Because your digital death could be far more troublesome than the paper version.

Triumph of the will

You already know what to do about your good old-fashioned paper death. You write a will, setting out which of your loved ones will inherit the title deeds to your property and other assets.

Half of us still don’t bother, which is ridiculous, given that you can Write a Will For A Cheap Price.

Even fewer of us are prepared for our digital death.

Sudden digital death syndrome

When we die, our body and soul aren’t the only things that stop functioning, our online persona will also pop its clogs. If there is an afterlife, you won’t find it on Facebook or Twitter.

This is a big problem, now that we live such active online lives. We have net-based bank and savings accounts, pensions and investment portfolios, and personal effects such as music, movies, photographs, blogs and social media accounts.

As banks, insurers and other financial organisations push towards paper-free statements to save money (and the planet, they claim), the trend will only grow.

In the online world, you won’t leave a paper trail when you die, according to will-writing experts at law firm Hart Brown, which recently highlighted the problem. That makes it difficult for relatives to put the online pieces back together.

Online life after death

If you want your loved ones to know about your online activities after you die, you must assemble all the necessary data. You could call it your digital will.

If not, your digital effects will effectively be buried with you. Ancient tribal societies used to do this, so people could use their kit in the afterlife.

We don’t have such high hopes of the afterlife, so please, bequeath your online life to the living.

Death is not the end

When people died in pre-digital days, they generally left plenty of paperwork, so relatives could find where the money was.

That’s not so easy if their personal and financial data is buried on unnamed websites. Or if they have a massive digital music collection, but you are struggling to access it from their computer. Or don’t know who is supposed to inherit it.

Passwords are another problem. Even if you have a vague idea of where they bought their pensions, ISAs and insurance, you will need their login details to access them.

If your loved one has uploaded photographs and videos to social media such as Facebook and YouTube, you will need login details for them as well.

And you will also have to decide whether you want to bury that highly personal blog.

People are starting to include this sort of information in their wills, Hart Brown says. The danger is that a will is a public document, which anybody can view for £6 by applying to the Probate Registry. You won’t want your login passwords publicised this way.

Legacy locker

Several years ago, I made an attempt at tackling this problem. I printed out all the account numbers for my pensions, investments, insurance policies, and so on, and handed them to a relative for safekeeping, in case of my death.

Lazily, I have failed to update the information. I also forgot to include online passwords. I keep meaning to overhaul it, but haven’t got round to it yet.

May be a better option is to store all the information in one of the growing numbers of online digital legacy lockers.

It is quite a problem, and one few of us have faced up to. Dying once is bad enough. Dying twice could be even worse.

Digital zombie attack!

When you die, you will leave a digital legacy behind you. You want to leave it to the right people.

You also want to prevent online fraudsters (or even greedy relatives) from robbing your digital grave, or even bringing your online ID back from the dead, forcing you to roam the net as a digital zombie.

Start thinking about it now. Otherwise your digital death could come back to haunt your family.

More: Cost of living rises as families need £25k to break even

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Comments (8)

  • Talent
    Love rating 50
    Talent said

    Hi johnmxn3, it may not be a swear word that Steviebaby1959 was using, he could be bashing his head against a very large monitor (but not as large as his ego, hey!).

    Report on 10 December 2011  |  Love thisLove  0 loves
  • circularrobins
    Love rating 1
    circularrobins said

    One handy need-to-know is that even where there is a will, the nominated executor does not necessarily need to apply for probate when the net estate (assets balanced against debts) is less than £5k. Once the executor has completed the necessary form for the Department for Work and Pensions provided by the Registrar with the first death certificate regarding payment of State pensions and benefits, HMRC and the local council (for council tax and other benefits) also receive this info automatically and will contact the executor. I think that this is a recent development that has been trialled and may not necessarily be available everywhere yet, but it seems to work very well.

    Any benefits/State pensions which have been overpaid must be repaid immediately and the payee's bank will do this automatically, but once it has been done the banks (depending on their individual thresholds) will also normally release amounts of cash below this threshold, provided that the executor produces the usual two forms of ID and original copy of the death certificate, either at the local branch (of the executor, where this is convenient) or by post. What is important is to keep bank statements (even if printed out from online), copies of loan, tenancy and mortgage agreements, funeral plans, insurance policies, investments and so on with the will for the executor, as it can be very difficult to trace direct debits (DDs) through the bank statement where, for example, a loan has been taken out through Tesco or Alliance & Leicester etc to name but two. The former changed its banking arrangements from being in its name but via RBS as provider to its own bank, and A&L's back office was closed down and neither has routinely updated its DD originator details for the banks. In both cases the originator's details for the loan provided to the bank current account of the deceased may be the original outdated ones and it can be very difficult to obtain the correct current contact details.

    Both mischka100 and steviebaby1959 are correct, online digital contact details should not be used by the executor for estate business; access to other material for social contacts is more of a courtesy as described by dampflok, the intrinsic value of blogs is likely to be zero once the writer is deceased as there will be no more updating and the writer will not be available for promotions.

    Most financial institutions and utilities providers seem to have a Bereavement/Probate/Legal department which will know what should be done, and this should be the first point of contact - otherwise you may be endlessly passed from one department to another, none of which knows what to do except pass the parcel (you) as quickly as possible to someone, anyone at random, else.

    I hope this summary helps someone at a difficult time.

    Report on 26 December 2011  |  Love thisLove  0 loves

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