With TikTok on the brink, it's time to talk about digital estate planning

The clock is ticking on Tiktok’s presence in the US amid a recent appellate court ruling upholding a law banning the app – making it a good time to think about estate planning.

That might sound like a non sequitur, at least to the 86 percent of people who said they have not considered the planning needs for their digital assets, according to recent survey. That category includes things that have an obvious monetary value, such as crypto assets, particularly notable with the price of bitcoin reaching $107,000 this week. But it also includes hard-to-replace information, such as biometric or account security data, or even data with purely sentimental value, such as images in social media posts.

And as aspects of our lives increasingly are online, it makes a lot of sense to plan for what happens to one’s digital footprint after death, said Jamie Hopkins, chief wealth officer at WSFS Bank and Bryn Mawr Trust.

“Only 14 percent [of people] stated that they any kind of documents that dealt with digital assets” related to estate planning,” said Hopkins, who analyzed the data from the survey his firm commissioned. “That’s an opportunity and a risk for financial professionals.”

The opportunity is to educate clients – and prospective ones – on the needs for digital estate planning. The risk, for an estate planner, anyway, is not offering that, as all but two US states require it as part of the profession, he said.

The issue hasn’t been at the forefront of planning because, in part, people dying over the past decade have been reaching 83 – and social media use in that age group skewed low, he said.

That of course is changing, and planning will help ensure that partners or family members won’t have to take social media companies or email providers to court to access the deceased’s accounts to retrieve media or change or deactivate them.

Companies like X, formerly Twitter, claim ownership of the accounts and handles, even if the same isn’t necessarily true of the media posted by users. Accounts in a person’s name may not be transferred, Hopkins said.

“You can give people access to it for purposes of wrapping it up, because you do own the potential underlying copyrights for photos and tweets,” he said.

“This is going to become a bigger and bigger issue.”

It’s also an issue that hasn’t been settled in the courts, he said. X, for example, had claimed ownership of the Infowars account handle on its platform, meaning that it could not have been transferred to The Onion, which had won a bankruptcy auction to purchase the conspiracy theory site’s assets. Since that sale has been blocked in court, for now, the issue has not been resolved, Hopkins said.

TikTok’s uncertain fate also illuminates the issue. The Chinese-owned company will begin to be shutdown Jan. 19 in the US, unless it is sold to a domestic buyer or the US Supreme Court agrees to its request, filed today, to hear its case. TikTok account owners thus have a limited window, at least for now, to try to get some of their media out of the site, Hopkins said.

“A lot of people are shocked to find that they don’t own the account,” he said.

Even prominent users, influencers, often fail to recognize that, making the mistake of establishing nontransferable accounts before they take off, he said.

“Their biggest mistake is that they typically become influencers first and then set up all the planning stuff afterward,” he said. “Realistically [the accounts] should be set up inside of the business first.”

Valuable or not, nearly two-thirds of Americans said they plan to leave some of their digital assets to heirs, and 42 percent indicated they want their accounts deleted when they become incapacitated or die, the survey found. The report is based on responses from 1,500 people, half of whom were considered high net worth, in September and October.

Overall, 44 percent of those with financial advisors said planning around digital assets has been raised as a topic. About three quarters of high-net-worth people said they plan to bequeath such assets, but only 36 percent of their advisors had broached the subject, they said.

And people estimate the value, or at least the cost of replacing their data and media, quite highly.

On average, that figure was over $191,000, people said in the survey. Among high-net-worth respondents it was much higher, at nearly $991,000.

“What would you pay for your email, if you lost all of it?” Hopkins said. “It matters to you. It might have value to you, even if it doesn’t have value to someone else.”