Mr Branding: How Prepared Americans Are to Leave Their Logins and Online Accounts Behind After They Pass Away?

Monday, July 22, 2024

How Prepared Americans Are to Leave Their Logins and Online Accounts Behind After They Pass Away?

When you are gone from this world, where will your digital assets like passwords, crypto wallets, investments and banking passwords go? All About Cookies conducted a survey of 1,000 Americans to find out how prepared they are to pass their digital inheritance after they die. According to the findings, one in three Americans have no plan at all for that. But 67% of respondents said that they have a plan to inherit their banking passwords once they pass away. The least planned accounts are cryptocurrency wallets (37%), Personal websites (35%), business accounts (31%) and airline and hotel rewards (31%).

The study also shed some light on how people store digital assets. 56% of them store them digitally like in an app which automatically transfers information to an heir. 44% store them physically on a diary or paper and 39% just store them mentally. 40% of Americans have no way they can share information after they pass away. 39% of them also have very simple and hackable passwords.

42% of the respondents said that they have shared their digital information with their spouse, while 13% have shared it with a parent and 8% with a friend. 34% of them have shared the digital estate with no one at all. Only 3% of the respondents have shared it with an attorney or estate executor. 24% of the respondents have shared their log in details in their wills while 41% of respondents don’t have any mentions of online accounts in their will. 35% have shared neither their log in details nor their online accounts in their will.

Most of the people have shared their online information with their partners so the researchers asked how easy they have made their digital assets accessible to their partners. The responses were: Very easy (46%), somewhat easy (46%), somewhat difficult (18%) and very difficult (6%). Many of the people also have funding accounts, sports betting accounts and gaming accounts with real money. 50% of the respondents said that their partners have no idea about these accounts. Respondents said that they have $8000 median value of assets which will go to waste as no one knows about them.

As it is a digital age, people should make plans to inherit their passwords to their loved ones. The best ways to do it are by using password managers for seniors or use Apple iCloud keychain.