Digital Assets and Online Accounts in Your Florida Estate Plan

Digital assets in your Florida estate plan are the online accounts, files, and electronic property you own or control — email, photos, social media, cryptocurrency, cloud storage, domain names, and loyalty points — along with the legal authority you grant someone to access and manage them after you die or become incapacitated. In Florida, that authority is governed primarily by the Florida Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (FADAA), found at Chapter 740 of the Florida Statutes. Without clear language in your will, trust, or power of attorney, your loved ones may be locked out of accounts they have every moral right to reach but no legal key to open.

I have sat across the table from a widow in Boca Raton who could see her late husband’s email inbox blinking with unpaid invoices and had no password, no recovery phone, and no court order that any provider would honor. The estate was solvent. The grief was manageable. The digital lockout was the thing that turned a six-week probate into a ten-month ordeal. This article explains how to keep that from happening to the people you love.

What counts as a digital asset under Florida law

Florida’s FADAA defines a digital asset broadly as “an electronic record in which an individual has a right or interest.” That is intentionally wide. In practice, the digital property in a typical estate falls into a few buckets:

• Communications — email accounts, text and chat archives, and the metadata around them. These get special protection under federal law.
• Financial and currency — online banking and brokerage logins, PayPal and Venmo balances, and cryptocurrency held in exchanges or self-custody wallets.
• Stored content — Google Drive, iCloud, Dropbox, the thousands of family photos that now live nowhere but a phone and a server.
• Identity and social — Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and the running account of a person’s life that families often want preserved or memorialized.
• Revenue and value — domain names, monetized YouTube or blog accounts, e-commerce storefronts, airline miles, and hotel points that may actually be worth real money.

One distinction matters more than people expect. You usually do not own an online account the way you own a car. You own a contractual license to use it, governed by a terms-of-service agreement. That is why simply listing “my Facebook” in a will does not transfer it. What your estate plan really controls is access — the legal right of your fiduciary to step into your shoes and act.

How Florida’s RUFADAA (Chapter 740) decides who gets access

Florida adopted a version of the national Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, codified as Chapter 740. The statute creates a clear order of priority — a hierarchy that determines whose instructions a tech company must follow.

The three-tier hierarchy

1. An online tool comes first. If a provider offers its own in-app designation — Google’s Inactive Account Manager or Apple’s Legacy Contact, for example — and you use it, that choice overrides everything else, including your will. This is the single most overlooked feature in modern estate planning.
2. Your estate documents come second. If you have not used an online tool, then the directions in your will, trust, or durable power of attorney control whether your fiduciary gets access and how much.
3. The terms-of-service agreement comes last. If you are silent in both places, the provider’s own contract governs — and most of those contracts default to limited disclosure or none at all.

The practical lesson is blunt: silence is a decision, and it is almost always the wrong one. Under Chapter 740, a personal representative or trustee with the right authorizing language can request disclosure of digital assets, but the provider may still distinguish between the content of communications and a mere catalogue of them.

Content versus catalogue

Because of the federal Stored Communications Act, email and message content enjoys heightened protection. A provider may lawfully refuse to hand over the actual words of your emails unless you gave specific consent — typically in your estate documents — to disclose them. A catalogue (who you emailed and when, without the body) is easier to obtain. So a will that grants access to “digital assets” generally is weaker than one that expressly consents to disclosure of the content of electronic communications. The exact phrasing carries real weight here.

Why blended families and second marriages raise the stakes

Our firm focuses on blended families, and digital assets are where these estates quietly go wrong. When there is a surviving second spouse and children from a first marriage, the default access rules can hand control of deeply personal accounts to exactly the person the other side trusts least.

Consider a few patterns we see in South Florida:

• The shared photo library. Decades of pictures of the first family live in an iCloud account the second spouse can unlock. Without instructions, the children may lose access to the only record of their late parent and their mother’s wedding.
• The crypto wallet no one mentions. A self-custody wallet with a meaningful balance is invisible to probate unless someone knows the seed phrase. If only the second spouse has it, the first family’s inheritance can evaporate — not through theft, but through silence.
• The business email that runs the money. When a spouse ran a company, the operating accounts often sit behind one personal email. Whoever controls that inbox effectively controls the business continuity.

For blended families, the answer is rarely “give everything to the surviving spouse.” It is to name the right fiduciary for digital matters, sometimes a neutral one, and to separate sentimental access from financial control. A revocable trust is often the cleanest vehicle, because it lets you spell out who manages digital property without the delay and publicity of probate. If you want a deeper look at how trusts protect competing beneficiaries, Morgan Legal’s overview of walks through the structures we adapt for Florida families.

Building digital assets into your Florida documents

A complete plan touches at least four instruments. Each does a different job, and a gap in any one creates a lockout.

Your durable power of attorney

This is for incapacity, not death — and it is the document people forget. Under Florida law a durable power of attorney must grant digital-asset authority expressly; a general grant of power does not automatically reach online accounts. If you suffer a stroke and your agent needs to pay bills routed through an online-only bank, the POA has to say so. Florida’s stringent power-of-attorney statute (Chapter 709) means vague language will get rejected by the institution.

Your will or trust

Your will or trust should name a fiduciary’s authority over digital assets and include explicit consent to disclose the content of electronic communications, tracking the Chapter 740 language. In a trust-based plan, the trustee gets the same grant. This is also where you decide whether one person handles both money and memories, or whether you split those roles.

Online tools and provider settings

Spend an afternoon configuring the in-platform designations, because they legally outrank your will:

• Google — set up Inactive Account Manager to name a trusted contact and a wait period.
• Apple — add a Legacy Contact in your iCloud settings so a person you choose can request access with a death certificate.
• Facebook — designate a Legacy Contact or choose permanent deletion.
• Password manager — most offer an emergency-access feature that releases your vault to a named person after a delay you control.

A secure, separate access inventory

Never put passwords or seed phrases in your will — a will becomes a public record once it is filed with the court. Instead, keep an encrypted inventory (a reputable password manager or a sealed document with your attorney) that lists your accounts and points your fiduciary to where the credentials live. The inventory tells them what exists; the legal documents tell them they are allowed to reach it.

Common mistakes Boca Raton estates make with digital property

• Writing passwords into the will. It exposes them publicly and they go stale within weeks anyway.
• Assuming the surviving spouse “has it handled.” In blended families, this is how the first family loses photos and the second spouse inherits a fight.
• Ignoring cryptocurrency. No seed phrase, no inheritance — there is no customer-service line and no court that can recover a lost private key.
• Forgetting the power of attorney. Plans built only for death leave a gaping hole if you are alive but incapacitated.
• Using boilerplate that predates Chapter 740. Older documents lack the content-disclosure consent that providers now require.

When the account holder is also aging or incapacitated

Digital-asset planning overlaps heavily with elder law, because cognitive decline often arrives before death. An agent under a properly drafted durable power of attorney can manage online finances, cancel auto-renewing subscriptions that drain an account, and protect a vulnerable person from online fraud — but only with express digital authority in place. Coordinating digital access with broader incapacity planning is one of the reasons we work the two together; Morgan Legal’s illustrates how those protections fit alongside Medicaid and guardianship planning, and the same principles apply under Florida’s framework.

If your matter will run through Florida courts, understanding how digital assets surface during administration matters too; our overview of Florida probate explains where a personal representative’s authority begins and ends.

Getting this right in Boca Raton

Digital assets are not a side note anymore. For most South Florida families, a meaningful share of both sentimental and financial wealth now lives behind a login. The fix is not complicated, but it is specific: layered authority across your will or trust, your durable power of attorney, the providers’ own tools, and a secure inventory — all using language that tracks Chapter 740. For blended families especially, the goal is to make sure the right person holds the right key, and that no one is locked out of a memory or a fortune by accident.

Our Boca Raton estate planning attorneys build digital-asset provisions into every plan we draft. If you want to review your existing documents or start fresh, you can schedule a consultation with our team, or read more about our Florida .

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Florida law let my family access my email and online accounts after I die?

Yes, but only with the right authority. Florida’s Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (Chapter 740) lets a personal representative or trustee request digital assets, and providers follow a priority order: any online tool you set up (like Google Inactive Account Manager) comes first, then your will, trust, or power of attorney, then the provider’s terms of service. For the actual content of emails, your estate documents must include express consent to disclosure.

Should I list my passwords in my will?

No. A will becomes a public court record once it is filed, so passwords and cryptocurrency seed phrases should never go in it. Keep credentials in an encrypted password manager or a sealed inventory held by your attorney, and use your legal documents only to grant your fiduciary the authority to access those accounts.

What happens to cryptocurrency in a Florida estate if no one has the seed phrase?

It is effectively lost. Self-custody crypto cannot be recovered by any court, exchange, or attorney without the private key or seed phrase. That is why a secure access inventory is essential — particularly in blended families, where only one person may know the key and the other heirs can be cut out by silence rather than intent.

Why does a power of attorney matter for digital assets?

Because incapacity often comes before death. Florida’s power-of-attorney statute (Chapter 709) requires that authority over digital assets be granted expressly, not by general language. Without it, your agent may be unable to manage online banking, cancel subscriptions, or protect you from fraud while you are alive but unable to act for yourself.

How do digital assets create problems in blended families and second marriages?

Default access rules can hand control of personal accounts — shared photo libraries, family email, even crypto wallets — to a surviving second spouse, locking out children from a first marriage. The solution is to name the right fiduciary for digital matters, often separating sentimental access from financial control, frequently through a revocable trust that spells out exactly who manages each category of digital property.