Wealth Matters: Forgotten in Estate Planning: Online Passwords

At 72, he said his concern was not about Facebook or e-mail. It was for their financial lives, which have migrated online, making paper account statements anachronistic. Now, when people die without disclosing their financial affairs to anyone, there is often no paper trail for heirs to follow.

“You’d never know someone else’s financial arrangements, but if it was paperwork you’d have a clue,” Mr. Ginsberg said. “I’m entirely comfortable doing absolutely everything online. But if I have to take over for my brother or my partner, I don’t have any of their information.”

In its annual Wealth and Worth study, released this week, U.S. Trust said 45 percent of the high-net-worth people it polled had not organized passwords and account information for their digital lives in a place where heirs or an executor would find them. (By contrast, the bank said that 87 percent knew the location of important documents and most had a will.)

Much has been written about how family members struggle to get access to the e-mail and social network accounts of loved ones who have died. They have sentimental value much the way photo albums and personal letters do. But far less attention has been paid to the logins, passwords and answers to security questions that will give access to an online financial life.

In an era when far fewer records are kept on paper, spouses and children may not even know that some accounts exist. Think of savings accounts that are only online, or a rollover retirement account that hasn’t been touched in years.

“It’s not only something that needs to be addressed with an individual dying,” Chris Heilmann, chief fiduciary executive at U.S. Trust, said. “If an individual becomes incapacitated, people typically plan for someone to have a durable power of attorney so someone can step in and handle your affairs. But now you’re finding the attorney has to deal with your digital issues. They have to access your computer; they have to pay bills for you.”

Sharing the combination of letters or numbers that give access to a person’s most important financial details is turning out to be a lot harder than telling loved ones that everything they need to know is in a safe deposit box. What can people do?

There are many Web sites and tools that allow people to upload their accounts and passwords in so-called digital vaults. They promise security and a one-stop shop for disparate digital lives. But they often go unused — just as there are a lot of lawyers around but not everyone has an estate plan.

People need to record their account information and passwords just as they need to make an appointment to draw up a will. And that seems to be the problem.

Joel Feldman, a retired garment manufacturer, said he had an estate plan but he had been reluctant to write down all of his logins and passwords and give them to his son. He also does not use a financial adviser, who would know some of that information.

“It does concern me,” Mr. Feldman said. “I keep saying I’m going to make a CD of my bank statements and put it in my safe deposit box, but I don’t do it.”

He said he figured that his son could probably find everything on his computer.

One reason people say they put off drawing up a list is that passwords are constantly changing. But that doesn’t seem to be the reality for many in retirement now. Mr. Feldman said he has only two or three different passwords because he would forget more than that.

Kieran Clifford, a retired vice president for finance from Lucent, said the password to his Gmail account was recently stolen. By combing through past e-mails, the hacker found a Fidelity statement, got the account number, and e-mailed his broker at a separate firm to transfer $250,000 to a bank in Hong Kong. Everything had the same password — his initials and date of birth.