Most adults now hold real value in places a traditional will was never written to reach: an online brokerage account, a PayPal balance, years of family photos stored in the cloud, a Bitcoin wallet, a domain name generating monthly income. These aren’t edge cases anymore. They’re part of how people manage money, store memories, and run small businesses. They sit outside the scope of estate documents that were drafted before any of them existed.
The challenge isn’t just forgetting to list these accounts. Without specific legal authority, the people you trust most may have no lawful way to access them, even with your passwords in hand. North Carolina addressed this directly when it enacted the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act in 2016, but the law only helps if your documents are drafted to work with it. At Oak City Estate Planning, we’ve spent more than three decades helping Raleigh families put plans in place that reflect how they actually live. Today that means addressing digital assets the same way we address real property or financial accounts.
What Counts as a Digital Asset Today
North Carolina’s Chapter 36F of the General Statutes defines a digital asset broadly: any electronic record in which a person has a right or interest. That definition captures far more than most people expect.
Financial and business digital assets are usually the first category people think of:
- Cryptocurrency held in exchange accounts or self-custodied wallets
- PayPal, Venmo, and Cash App balances that may hold meaningful funds
- Online brokerage accounts accessed entirely through a web interface
- Domain names and monetized websites that generate ongoing revenue
The personal and sentimental category is just as significant. Email accounts often contain years of correspondence, contracts, and records. Cloud storage services like Google Photos or iCloud may hold the only copies of family photos and videos. Social media profiles represent a documented personal history, and some families want them memorialized rather than deleted. Streaming subscriptions and digital media libraries carry real monetary value, even if they don’t feel like an “asset” in the traditional sense.
How North Carolina’s Fiduciary Access Law Actually Works
North Carolina enacted the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act as Session Law 2016-53, now codified at Chapter 36F of the General Statutes. The law establishes a priority order that determines who controls access to a digital account. That order may not follow what you assumed.
First priority goes to a platform’s own online tool: a legacy contact, inactive account manager, or digital heir designation. If you’ve designated someone through Facebook’s memorialization settings or Google’s Inactive Account Manager, that designation controls above everything else, including your will.
Second priority goes to directions in a valid estate planning document. A will, trust, or power of attorney that explicitly grants digital asset authority takes effect only if no platform online tool exists or if the platform doesn’t offer one.
Third priority, and the least favorable outcome, is the platform’s terms-of-service agreement. If neither an online tool nor estate documents address the account, the company’s default rules apply. Those rules frequently prohibit account sharing and don’t provide a clear path for a family member to gain access without a court order.
One limitation most families don’t know about: Chapter 36F doesn’t extend to digital assets an employee uses in the ordinary course of an employer’s business. If you access work email, a company file-sharing system, or a business platform through an employer-issued account, those assets fall outside what your estate documents can authorize a fiduciary to access. Business owners and remote employees who blend personal and professional accounts should think through this distinction carefully.
Building Digital Asset Authority Into Your Documents
Knowing the law’s priority structure leads directly to a practical question: do your current documents actually grant the authority Chapter 36F requires?
Wills & Trusts
General property language in an older will may not be sufficient. For an executor or trustee to access, manage, and distribute digital assets, including the content of electronic communications, the document needs to say so explicitly. A will drafted before 2016 almost certainly doesn’t include this language, and even some documents drafted after the law passed may not use language precise enough to satisfy a platform’s legal team or a court. Wills and trusts address what happens after death, so this is where you authorize your personal representative or trustee to handle accounts as part of estate administration.
Durable Powers of Attorney
The authority granted by a will doesn’t begin until death. If you become incapacitated and can’t manage your own accounts, your agent under a durable power of attorney needs their own explicit digital asset authority. This is a separate drafting requirement from the will, and it’s easy to overlook because incapacity feels like a different problem from estate planning. Under North Carolina law, these two situations involve different documents with different triggering events, and each one needs its own authorization language.
What Shouldn’t Go in a Will
Passwords, cryptocurrency private keys, and seed phrases should never be written directly into a will or trust. Once a will is admitted to probate, it becomes a public record that anyone can read. The right approach is to maintain a separate, secure digital asset inventory that your executor or agent knows how to find, stored in a way that isn’t accessible to the public. Your estate documents authorize access to that inventory; they don’t contain it.
Where Digital Asset Plans Go Wrong
Even families who know digital assets matter tend to fall into a few predictable gaps.
Relying on One Person’s Memory
Passing passwords verbally or keeping them in a single person’s head creates a fragile system. If that person is unavailable, forgetful, or gone, there’s no backup. A maintained, secure inventory that’s updated when accounts change is the only approach that holds up in practice.
Conflicting Instructions Across Documents & Platforms
Setting a platform’s legacy tool in one direction while leaving a will or power of attorney silent, or pointing the other way, creates a conflict. Under Chapter 36F’s priority framework, the online tool wins. If you designated someone as your legacy contact five years ago and have since changed your mind, that platform setting may override the choice reflected in your current will.
Self-Custodied Cryptocurrency Without a Documented Recovery Path
Cryptocurrency held in a self-custodied wallet has no company to call for recovery. If the private key or seed phrase is lost, undocumented, or stored somewhere no one can find after death, those assets are permanently unreachable. No court order, no will, and no legal authority can recover what the blockchain itself has locked. Documentation before anything happens is the only protection.
Keeping Your Digital Plan Current
Digital habits change faster than most estate plans get reviewed. New accounts open, old ones close, cryptocurrency holdings shift between wallets and exchanges, and platform tools update their interfaces and policies. A plan designed around the accounts you had three years ago may already have gaps.
This is one reason our four-step planning process includes a dedicated vision meeting where we ask about the full picture of your assets, including the digital ones. We encourage clients to revisit their plans as circumstances change, and we’re here for those conversations as they come up. If you want to make sure your estate plan actually covers what you own today, reach out to Oak City Estate Planning at (919) 975-5359.