Digital Estate Planning

Most digital estate planning gaps aren’t caused by negligence — they’re caused by a plan that was solid for the world of ten years ago and never got revisited. These are the mistakes that come up most often among Fort Worth families. Writing passwords directly into a will Wills become public record during probate Assuming … Read more

When a Fort Worth family loses a parent, the practical work of settling an estate used to mean a filing cabinet, a safe deposit box, and a few bank statements. Today it also means a phone that only unlocks with a fingerprint that no longer exists, a cryptocurrency wallet with no paper trail, and a … Read more

When people hear “digital assets,” most think only of cryptocurrency. In reality, the average person now owns dozens of digital assets — many worth real money, others worth something harder to price: years of family memories. The full picture Financial: cryptocurrency, online brokerage accounts, PayPal/Venmo balances, airline miles and credit card points Business: domain names, … Read more

RUFADAA — the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act — is the law most states, including Texas, have adopted to answer one specific question: who is legally allowed to access a deceased or incapacitated person’s digital accounts, and under what authority? Why this law exists Before RUFADAA, federal privacy and computer-fraud laws technically … Read more

“Not your keys, not your coins” is a phrase every crypto owner has heard. It means: if you don’t personally control the private key to a wallet, you don’t really own what’s in it — an exchange or custodian does, and they can freeze or lose it. Fewer people apply that same logic to what … Read more

A password manager and a digital vault sound like the same thing. For daily use, they’re close enough. For estate planning, the difference matters. Primary purpose Fast, secure daily logins Long-term legacy access and transfer Emergency access Sometimes, as an add-on feature Built in as a core function Legal/estate integration Rare Often designed to work … Read more

Most major platforms now offer some way to handle an account after death — but the options are limited, platform-specific, and most people never set them up in advance. What each platform actually offers Facebook/Instagram (Meta): a Legacy Contact can manage a memorialized account; without one, family can request memorialization or removal with a death … Read more

Digital assets are easy for even a thorough estate planning conversation to miss — not because attorneys don’t care, but because the traditional intake questions were built for a world of bank accounts and real estate, not crypto wallets and cloud storage. The three questions worth adding to every consultation “Do you have any assets … Read more

Most estate plans name one executor to handle everything. For a growing number of Fort Worth families, that’s starting to create a mismatch — the person best suited to handle a house sale and probate paperwork isn’t always the person who understands cryptocurrency wallets or knows how to navigate a platform’s account-recovery process. What a … Read more

Fort Worth has a growing base of entrepreneurs running businesses that exist almost entirely online — e-commerce stores, content platforms, domain portfolios, and yes, NFT collections. These assets are easy for a traditional estate plan to overlook entirely, because they don’t fit neatly into “real estate” or “bank accounts.” Why these need specific attention Domain … Read more