The Internet has made estate planning a little more complicated.
Social media accounts like Facebook and Twitter have specific, technical processes for the handling of personal information once someone’s passed away, as do email handlers like Yahoo and Gmail. Coordinating the entire ordeal can be a daunting process.
Woody Levin had the epiphany to create a digital “safety deposit box” for all his online assets in the event of his passing. Estate Assist was born, and is officially in Beta testing as of October 1st.
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What is Estate Assist?
Estate Assist stores your online passwords, digital health accounts, social media accounts, payment accounts, and other digital info in an accessible online account. It also allows you to scan physical documents (i.e. birth certificate, life insurance policy) and upload them to the site for safekeeping. Virtually any documentation of importance can be stored in Estate Assist’s digital vault. It then informs the loved one of your choosing that they have access to this account upon your passing, and permits access once your passing has been verified.
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How is Estate Assist different from other online estate assistance firms?
Most online estate firms work with law firms to coordinate efforts to store personal data, with little or no online access permitted to the account’s creator. Estate permits access and management for the user prior to their actual passing.
Estate Assist also employs state-of-the-art security measures for your account, including bank-level ID protection, identity theft protection and identity restoration.
What’s most unique about Estate Assist, however, is its ability to pull real-time financial info. Estate Assist has a partnership with Intuit and hooks into the Intuit API to aggregate your financial and other data so that it is updated in real time, allowing greater ease in the shutting off of bills once the account owner has passed, for example.
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Is online estate assistance necessary?
Without question, having an online safe deposit box for all our digital information is a smart idea, especially considering how much of your personal information is floating around out there on the cloud.
Also, it makes things immeasurably easier in the event of your actual passing – your loved ones won’t have to go through multiple channels to gain access to the live.com account you set up back in 2002, nor have to sift through mounds of paperwork. Everything in one place. Estate Assist is worth it, if just for the headaches it will eliminate.
