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This interview explores the critical importance of managing digital assets in estate planning, highlighting the challenges of digital inheritance, account access, and cybersecurity risks. Tatiana Thurston and Natalia Parker share insights on creating effective digital estate plans, tools, and best practices.
KEYWORDS:
Digital assets, estate planning, digital inheritance, cybersecurity, online accounts, digital executor, wills, estate law, digital legacy, digital estate management
KEY TOPICS
- Digital assets definition and scope
- Challenges in digital inheritance and estate planning
- Tools and strategies for digital asset management
- Legal and cybersecurity risks in digital estate planning
Guest Name
Tatiana Thurston and Natalia Parker
Sound Bites
- “Biometric security doesn’t work after death.”
- “Planning ahead saves hundreds of hours and pain.”
- “Domain name issues can take months to resolve.”
Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Digital Assets
01:28 Understanding Digital Assets and Their Importance
04:14 Challenges in Estate Planning for Digital Assets
09:17 Navigating Access and Security Risks
13:22 Creating an Inventory of Digital Assets
18:21 Preparing Executors for Digital Asset Management
24:40 Resources and Tools for Digital Asset Planning
GUEST RESOURCES
TRANSCRIPT
Frazer Rice (00:01.146)
Tatiana and Natalia, welcome aboard.
Natalia Parker (00:04.206)
Thank you.
Tatyana Thurston I Dexit (00:04.211)
Hi, thank you for having me.
Frazer Rice (00:05.966)
We are, this is a new frontier for wealth actually. You are the first two person interview I’ve done so far. So it looks like the technical issues seem to have gone away. That’s great. But we’re gonna talk about something that I think is the driver for your new company and something that’s important to me because when I’m advising people around a lot of different topics, either estate planning wise or wealth management wise, the digital asset question comes up and.
You’ve formed this new company. Tell us a little bit about that and more importantly tell us the problem that you’re trying to solve around digital assets
Tatyana Thurston I Dexit (00:40.83)
Okay, so I’ll first start with what is a digital asset because there’s a lot of different definitions out there and a lot of people have different concepts of what it might mean. of all, because crypto is in the news quite a bit, it is not just about crypto. Everybody has digital assets because basically if you are logging into an account and it is storing data, you have an account that has assets online and it could be monetized.
It could be social media, which means that the information that’s there is very personal to you. It could be that you have reward points you’ve accumulated. There’s all sorts of types of assets that are out there and there is a pain point problem. Let’s die down.
Natalia Parker (01:28.462)
Yes, and we started actually, it was interesting, Tatiana just went through the process of writing a will and she will tell about it. I went through a divorce where we had online business and it was really, really hard to trace all those online accounts because I had no understanding how many we had and what to do with them and how even to find them. And Tatiana wrote a will.
Frazer Rice (01:54.67)
Yeah, no. so just to put a finer point on that, it’s not only the monetary assets and the social media accounts and everything that basically requires a password to get into it probably in this day and age.
Natalia Parker (02:10.252)
Yes, and I can tell you more than I lost pictures of my family from my daughter’s birth to age seven because I didn’t think that the iCloud password and iCloud identity gone through a divorce. Yes.
Tatyana Thurston I Dexit (02:10.336)
That’s all.
Tatyana Thurston I Dexit (02:26.88)
So she can resell for it. Yeah.
Frazer Rice (02:26.992)
Yeah, and a very painful thing to go through. so, Tatiana, as we sort of look at that example and make the definition a little bit even more in depth, how else do you sort of think about that in terms of the roles that are played from a Will’s perspective?
Tatyana Thurston I Dexit (02:49.366)
So from a will perspective, you have two kinds of entities. You have things where business owners have created online accounts where their business is running off of certain platforms. And you also have a personal side aspect. And it may be an influencer, it may just be your personal account. The thing is that we’re dealing with a problem of immortality.
And this means that these accounts remain open, active and online, ready for hackers and ready for now, today, AI to continue the trajectory of that account because they’re making money off of the data that we’ve put online. So we actually have two things to look at. One is from the business perspective and how do you transfer a business over? Because maybe you’ve built a platform for 10 years on Facebook, right?
You have a following which is important to your base. Maybe you’re just a mom and you’ve put all your baby pictures on there, like Natalia, and then what is the loss? What is the impact of that loss? And both are really difficult on families. So estate planning means that we actually need to be looking at these accounts, we actually need to be planning for these accounts, because down the line, it’s gonna be a heavy impact, whether it’s sociological, emotional, or monetary.
Frazer Rice (04:14.552)
So as we think about this little bit further, the concept that these accounts are going to live on beyond the life of someone who created them. Maybe dive into that a little bit, because I imagine you not only have points of risk, certainly during the lifetime, and someone hacking in and pillaging your bank account or otherwise maybe blocking access or something like that, but what happens when someone passes away? How do those risks translate to the people who are inheriting these properties?
Natalia Parker (04:45.258)
Okay, let’s talk about it. We have those certain pain points. The first one, when somebody dies, the executor or administrator, they don’t know what is existence. They don’t know what kind of accounts the person had, what they wanted to do with those accounts. That’s a first problem because they don’t know even what banking, where the life insurance, did they have Venmo because they don’t have access to phone.
The second one, didn’t know what the person wanted to do with that account. Did they want to close, transfer, memorize it? They have no clue. The other one is authority as an executor doesn’t mean that you will get automatic access to the account. Many people think that yes, it is. No, for Google it doesn’t matter. Unless you were appointed as inactive account manager. The same for Apple.
Frazer Rice (05:48.68)
I was going to say those annoying terms of services agreements that no one reads and you click so that you get, you move on with life and get into your accounts, that’s where some of these details are buried. And the intersection between that and maybe what we call estate law and how an executor works, that’s where the friction takes place.
Natalia Parker (06:09.43)
Yes, I agree and many people don’t even know that that feature exists like legacy contact for Meta and Apple or inactive account manager. Otherwise, when you look at the hierarchy online tool, we call it Castonian tool, outweighs everything what you have in wheel. If the online tool wasn’t enabled, then it goes what kind of language you had in wheel.
if you appointed some digital executor and if that executor was authorized to have access to all your accounts. The third one, it always default to terms of service. Terms of service for basically 99 % of each company says do not give access.
Frazer Rice (06:56.09)
So if you were stuck and you didn’t do anything and you relied on the terms of service, you could be in a really deep set of troubles. They might delete your account, they may not allow access, or they may make it otherwise very difficult in order to access and do it. You think that the person who died with it wanted to have done.
Tatyana Thurston I Dexit (07:16.246)
That’s right.
Natalia Parker (07:16.598)
Absolutely.
Tatyana Thurston I Dexit (07:17.504)
That’s why some of these really large companies have a custodial tool. You do have to go to certain settings within the device or within the account. And you can enable these tools so that you can either add what could be a legacy contact. It may not have the term beneficiary on it, but it’s important to be able to enact that so that these settings will allow certain access down the line.
A lot of the companies are very particular about that the larger ones have it and then a lot of them don’t so Knowing which company has the most value to you and those terms of service is really important
Frazer Rice (08:01.84).
For someone who has an account that lives beyond them, there are identity and financial risks to having that. I can imagine, you know, when you put a credit card on file and, it’s auto-debated or you have information lurking out there that that’s a problem. Maybe talk a little bit about how bad that can get.
Tatyana Thurston I Dexit (08:21.517).
So I think there’s a few issues on that. We all know that there are scammers and hackers. The really important stories that have come out in the past is where AI is enabling recopying your name, image, and likeness posing as you live on a video stream or live on a phone call asking for money or data or information. And this is becoming really prevalent.
This is where families, if they want to save and secure their reputational legacy. But also perhaps crypto, perhaps their banking accounts, it’s really important that they understand that they are all subject to this hacking because probably the likelihood that they have a social media account is there and that means it has public access.
Frazer Rice (09:17.636).
So let’s dive into the tech problem. I can envision, and I’ve heard before, the concept of someone passes away and people can’t access the computer, the hard drive, the phone, all sorts of mechanisms that hold a lot of this data. I think you could probably extrapolate that to the cloud accounts and things like that where other information is held. How do you help people think about that?
Natalia Parker (09:28.162).
Mm-hmm.
Natalia Parker (09:44.398).
Two-factor authentication. It is your phone, your email, it is gateway to your estate, basically, administration. If you don’t have access to the deceased phone or email, you don’t know anything about their accounts, first of all, second of all, where all those codes are coming to, to that devices.
Frazer Rice (10:08.72).
Right. And how do you fix that problem?
Natalia Parker (10:12.91).
There are some settings on iPhone because we kind of everybody has iPhone some have androids but mostly it’s iPhones. Yes, you have to establish the legacy contact. You have to make sure that specific features are turned off or on like stolen device protection. If it is on, it’s basically impossible to override it.
Frazer Rice (10:20.793).
Right. Beware the green text.
Tatyana Thurston I Dexit (10:24.212).
Bye.
Natalia Parker (10:40.302).
because if 48 hours, is it 48 or 72, Tatiana?
Tatyana Thurston I Dexit (10:44.981).
Well, so what she’s referring to is that the latest update in Apple has this feature for stolen theft mode, it’s called. So this happened to us on an actual case. Someone had given us a phone and they said, can you help us? The problem was the person had passed away over 100 miles away. because Apple tracks our location everywhere we go, it’s a habitual, you know, we’re creatures of habit, right?
Same coffee shop, we go to the same store. So they know what our patterns of behavior are. As soon as it leaves that circle of trust, call it, that map of trust, theft mode can become enabled if the setting is on, which means that Apple has cut off any access to the phone. So for people who are dealing with families, let’s say, who live across state borders, this is a really difficult task for them. Because their phone is completely inaccessible because of theft mode not even because of the legacy contact.
Natalia Parker (11:51.278)
8.
Frazer Rice (11:51.345)
And then, you know, I’ve seen in movies and I’ve actually heard anecdotally, you know, the concept that the biometrics at play, they in a sense turn off too. It used to be you could take the phone and put it up to somebody’s face or you could take their finger and maybe get into the laptop by putting it onto the biometric reader. That world doesn’t exist anymore, correct?
Natalia Parker (11:58.594)
Mm-hmm.
Natalia Parker (12:12.162).
Correct. When you’re dead, the Face ID doesn’t work really well.
Frazer Rice (12:17.59)
Well, and that tells you something that they can tell whether you’re dead or not. And I would not have made that comment maybe six weeks ago before we started talking about this, saying, geez, these things are getting smarter. So as we start thinking about this, we’ve sort of analyzed a couple of pain points, areas where if you’re an executor and someone’s situation comes across their desk and they say, gosh, first of all, I have to try to know.
Natalia Parker (12:19.758)
Yes.
Frazer Rice (12:43.81)
What accounts are out there, what social media accounts, what subscriptions, what bank accounts, what crypto, what IP, that type of thing. So getting your arms around that’s important. Then the idea of hopefully someone has been organized enough to lay out where the accounts are and how to access them in one way, shape or form. And we can get into what a good practice is on that. But then if you’re the executor slash in conjunction with the estate planner slash the client,
Natalia Parker (12:48.545)
Yes.
Frazer Rice (13:13.402)
How do you plan for this so that you create a real organized state of affairs for the person who has to actually manage this stuff going forward?
Tatyana Thurston I Dexit (13:22.797)
So I think it’s important to understand priorities. So everyone’s different, everyone’s unique. There may be priorities that are social media based priorities where there’s a lot of crypto at stake or monetary funds, even perhaps reward points. That priority list is best done in an inventory.
Where we specialize is in the directives for this. So we’ve actually researched all these terms of services for hundreds of companies. We maintain this database so that someone can say, okay, if it’s company A, company A has three options for a directive. You can select that directive.
That means that the executor will then know exactly, this is what needs to be done with this account and this is what is of value either for the descendants, the beneficiaries, and so on. So first the inventory, but actually the directives is really important.
Frazer Rice (14:21.904)
By directives, mean something maybe an addendum to the will or something like that that says these the information or the value, whether it’s monetary or otherwise, is going to be transmitted to such and such a person and given full access to it. Is that really is that part of the advice is to say, you know, for the modern will drafter, let’s say that it’s a really good idea to have an inventory of what these digital assets are.
To set out who gets what in the will so that there’s a, let’s call it a backstop, so that if you have problems with the terms of service or something like that, you have something that goes through probate where somebody opines on that and you can actually get access to it after the fact.
Tatyana Thurston I Dexit (14:50.061)
Yep.
Tatyana Thurston I Dexit (15:08.565)
Yeah, so there’s two points there. There’s the access part and then there’s the directive part.
Natalia Parker (15:09.313)
Yes.
Frazer Rice (15:13.315)
Okay.
Natalia Parker (15:13.556)
Yes, there’s, yes, sorry, there is a language in the will where it’s actually specified that this is a digital executor who has the right to access all those accounts and perform all those duties.
Frazer Rice (15:32.068)
Got it. so in your experience, so Facebook or Google or Coinbase or things like that, for me anyway, in the last maybe three or four years ago, to get somebody on the phone to even have any understanding of what you’re talking about was gonna be just forget it, not happening. Are they getting better at understanding these situations?
Natalia Parker (15:56.074)
No, they’re not. They’re not. They don’t care. Facebook, it’s all AI. You don’t get a person on the phone in any case, Coinbase. You can, but it’s weeks of waiting for the response and they will ask you, we lost it. Can you resend it again?
All three companies you name, they do have policies.for transferring or for somebody who is dead. But it’s still very, very difficult to deal with them.
Tatyana Thurston I Dexit (16:32.069)
To add to that too and I’ll give you a case example is that we had social media requests to take the accounts down. Meta of course owns both Instagram and Facebook right and the images and memories that were left on these accounts were actually harming the kids.
The request was can we close these accounts out and of course you can but Facebook interestingly enough agreed of course to close the account and even though it’s owned by Meta, Instagram said, no, these photos do not violate our terms of service. So it doesn’t mean you can close out both just because it’s Metta. It’s really, really specific and it’s really in their hands.
Frazer Rice (17:19.003)
Lovely. That will warm people’s hearts that have to deal with this.
Tatyana Thurston I Dexit (17:22.143)
Natalia Parker (17:22.638)
Yes, it’s hard. And can you imagine we deal with this day after day, but people who have never been in this position, they don’t even know where to start.
Frazer Rice (17:34.747)
So walk us through what you think a good scenario would be for someone who wants to, let’s say they have, I don’t know, a bunch of accounts, both monetary and social media and maybe miles and maybe other things, stuff like that. And they walk into a trust and estate lawyer’s office and they say, okay, I’ve got my house, I’ve got my liquid assets, that stuff trust and estate lawyers know how to deal with.
but let’s say the lawyers aren’t as facile with the digital assets. A, help the person be a better client for that trust and states person so that it’s organized. And then, let’s start with that and then I have a follow-up question.
Tatyana Thurston I Dexit (18:21.055).
Okay, I would say the first thing is that, you know, there are modern problems and we need modern solutions. And that starts with the discovery and conversation that we do have these immortal accounts online. As much as we may not want to think about it, and we can get into other stories about this, but I won’t do that now, there are reasons to enact on these accounts.
That means deleting them, transferring, closing, out data, it might be biological data. There’s a lot of data and for me that means that data is money. It may not be money to us, but it’s money to companies. And what you want done with that is your choice still. So it’s important to make that decision.
I think that any estate planning attorney who starts this conversation with their clients is already helping move the needle because everyone has online accounts, the average user has at least probably around 200 accounts by now. And that’s without a work account.
Natalia Parker (19:28.492)
Yes, we developed a tool basically where we have inventory and 15-20 minutes with assigned directives and it’s prompt. Just choose the companies you have accounts with. They don’t have to remember. just, okay, I identified those companies and we already give them a choice of pre-selected, pre-vetted directives, assigned a directive. Then take these report and go to your state attorney.
Bring it, yes, bring it to them, include it into the wheel with specific language, appoint a digital executor, you’re set. Then you will just have to support it, kind of.
Frazer Rice (20:11.609)
No, so then the next question, so let’s say the paperwork from a will and a revocable trust, et cetera, is up to speed and covers the authority to access these. Then let’s say the executor is not the attorney and it’s a family member or a friend or something like that and you’re giving them the honor of helping to deal with all of this stuff. What do you deliver to them to help them be prepared for that time when you pass away?
Tatyana Thurston I Dexit (20:39.479)
We-
Natalia Parker (20:39.5)
We give step by step directions on how to deal with each company. We give what this company has, what kind of account is that, what kind of paperwork you need, what kind of documents in what time frame. For some companies it’s three years, for matter in their terms of service it’s 28 days, but hey, you have an account for years there.
Anyway, we give step by step directions. How to deal with this account to fulfill the directive. But if they can’t or they don’t want to, they can always hire and come to us.
Tatyana Thurston I Dexit (21:11.597)
Go.
Frazer Rice (21:17.361)
Sure. No, that’s the backstop too, is that you not only provide the tool, but also some support behind the tool and the experience of having dealt with some of those folks, maybe even the contacts to call it one or the other company to maybe get from A to Z a little bit faster.
Tatyana Thurston I Dexit (21:18.326)
Well…
Natalia Parker (21:20.717)
Yeah.
Tatyana Thurston I Dexit (21:21.26)
you
Tatyana Thurston I Dexit (21:35.245)
It can be very overwhelming, that is for sure, and I think tech is constantly changing and the terms of service is constantly changing. So we have lot of barriers to entry to enact professional executorship and do it as best we can and a lot of it is because of technical bottlenecks, if you like.
Natalia Parker (21:45.165)
Mm-hmm.
Frazer Rice (22:00.101)
So this is a bit of a catty question, which is how many times have you seen this properly set up? Because I can tell you right now, I feel like I’m pretty fashion forward as far as tech’s concerned. I see the issue. I know my estate plan. The poor person, in this case, my sister, who’s my executor, she’s gonna take one look at this and be like, thanks a lot, man.
Natalia Parker (22:08.651)
None.
Tatyana Thurston I Dexit (22:25.901)
What?
Frazer Rice (22:26.033)
And so I’m guilty as charge number one, but is anybody doing this with any sort of specificity yet?
Natalia Parker (22:26.478)
you
Tatyana Thurston I Dexit (22:34.785)
Well, can I just… sorry.
Natalia Parker (22:35.112)
No. I’ll start, Tatiana. Here’s the problem. We came across some people and they say that, I have spreadsheets where all my accounts and passwords are written down and my wife will deal with that at some point. First of all, there is no directives for those accounts. And second of all, it’s still illegal to log in under somebody else’s logins.
Frazer Rice (23:02.853)
Right.
Tatyana Thurston I Dexit (23:04.567)
And I was just gonna say the reason we started this company is exactly what you just described. My brother is my executor and I was like, man, there’s no way he’s gonna know how to start at all because I have my fingers in a lot of different businesses, my personal. And so, you know, that floor plan and sort of direction guide was sort of how we started this.
It became intense. I mean with Natalia. It became a really intense research project. We have a database that is constantly being updated. As executors become executors or as will writers are writing wills, we really want everybody to understand the importance of technology in this process. Because it’s moving really fast. Now that AI has come about we can even throw in the whole name image and likeness problem which a whole other sort of barrier of questions to ask.
Frazer Rice (24:11.501).
No, I’m going to bring you all back on to tackle that one separately. I think it’s worth its own half hour sort of figuring that out. But in the meantime, tell us a little bit about how people can find you. One of the things that I think you have on your website and some of your materials is a digest.
Really almost like a questionnaire or a brief that allows people to think through where they may have digital assets. It’s not just social media accounts and your bank accounts. They’re like fruit and flower miles, things like that. I hadn’t thought of that, but yes, that’s a big one. Where can people find you and what kind of resources do you have that people can get familiar with the topic as they embark on this fun assignment?
Tatyana Thurston I Dexit (24:45.399)
Thank you.
Tatyana Thurston I Dexit (24:59.809)
So the first place is our website and it’s actually, even though our company name is Dexit, which stands for digital exit, it’s Dexitplan.com because where we are proud is the actual plan of action that we’ve been able to customize for any individual. And then yes, we do have a sort of discovery questionnaire so that they can understand exactly what impacts them the most, where they may want to look at these accounts and have a plan for them.
And yeah, contact us anytime, email, phone. We’re here, we’re not chat bots. We want to be sure that you are talking to a human. We know how this AI slop is turning out and we don’t want to be any part of that.
Frazer Rice (25:46.501)
I was going to add on to that too. mean this is not just for the end clients, so for anybody who sort of understands that they have this issue, obviously check out your website and do all that. But I would argue that for the estate planners, the accountants, the wealth managers, etc. who are advising clients, it’s a good resource to kind of help you get your arms around it in terms of advising people who are looking for help on all these different things.
Tatyana Thurston I Dexit (25:55.041)
Yeah.
Natalia Parker (25:55.575)
Yes.
Tatyana Thurston I Dexit (26:04.68)
See you
Natalia Parker (26:11.136)
Yes, because you can have the most compliant language in the world. But the executor will still start with the zero on day one. They don’t know the inventory. They don’t have the directives. Finally, they don’t know how to deal with those accounts.
Frazer Rice (26:32.491).
So give us the website one more time. Then take us out here with a funny story. One you’ve dealt with in putting this company up to getting it up and running.
Tatyana Thurston I Dexit (26:42.381)
Okay, so that sounds great. So Dexit Plan. It’s D-E-X-I-T-P-L-A-N dot com. Dexit Plan dot com. And I guess I’ll leave you with a text story. We worked with a church here locally. They had their domain name purchased in 1997 and posted as in your own personal name. The person passed away over 20 years ago. Nothing was ever done with the titling of the church’s domain name.
But the church has been forever on this domain name. It’s been over 50 years so to remark it. Rebranding a dot org is not an easy task. Actually, no kidding it took us nine months to get the church back their domain name. That was finding people from 20 years ago reopening email accounts from a long time ago, getting signatures verified and processed.
It is actually doable, but it is definitely a task. So planning ahead of time would save hundreds of hours and a lot of pain. Absolutely.
Frazer Rice (27:52.241)
No, good object lesson for companies too. That it’s a good idea to see who owns what. Your domain name, any other digital IP, we’ll call it that. If you don’t have that in place. You may have a real forensic accounting job in the tech world to get everything back.
Tatyana Thurston I Dexit (28:02.274)
Yep.
Tatyana Thurston I Dexit (28:10.337)
That’s right.
Natalia Parker (28:10.72)
Yeah.
Frazer Rice (28:11.705)
Natalia, Tatiana, thank you so much for being on and we’ll look forward to talking again soon.
Tatyana Thurston I Dexit (28:16.811)
Thank you so much.
Natalia Parker (28:16.888)
Thank you.
TRUSTEE RESOURCES
NORTH CAROLINA ESTATE RESOURCES
Titles
- Mastering Digital Estate Planning: Protecting Your Online Legacy
- The Future of Wealth: Managing Digital Assets After Death