What happens to all of your online accounts—credit cards, merchants, news subscriptions, social media, streaming services—after you die? How will your heirs know how to access these accounts or understand what you want done with them? Most people haven’t considered these questions, and this lack of planning can create significant headaches for next of kin.

We studied challenges older adults encounter when thinking about what should happen to their online accounts after they die. We interviewed 21 American adults over age 60 to learn about their concerns, needs, and practices for their online accounts, as well as what would make planning for these accounts easier.

Most of the people we interviewed had hired lawyers or estate planners to draft wills specifying how their money and physical property should be handled after their deaths. They wanted to make sure that heirs had easy access to the money and assets left behind.

People also wanted their relatives to have easy access to their digital estates, but they had not done any formal planning and didn’t know how to plan for transitioning or shutting down online accounts, such as email, social media, and accounts for online bills. Some told us they hadn’t thought about their online accounts at all. Others said they assumed heirs would know what to do, or they assumed that giving heirs the passwords to accounts would be enough to grant access to their digital estates.

Unfortunately, more planning is typically necessary to smoothly transition a digital estate.

The older adults we interviewed mainly kept track of their passwords by hand: They wrote their passwords down on paper, or they stored them in a digital file.

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