How to Protect Your Digital Assets with Jamie Hopkins
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I've seen estate planners that are using a form that was built in the 90s for their stuff, and they make small modifications to it. So it's really not that safe to assume, even if you did it in the last couple years, in the last year, in the last six months, that the language is in there. You really do have to ask for it. ♪

Welcome to the Stay Wealthy Podcast. I'm your host, Taylor Schulte, and today we are talking about how to protect your digital assets with professor and author Jamie Hopkins. Now, you might be thinking, I have a normal corporate job. I don't own a website. I don't even know what cryptocurrency is. Like this, this doesn't apply to me.

But trust me, this topic applies to just about everybody. If you're listening to this podcast right now, it applies to you. A digital asset could be as simple as a username and password and what those credentials could be worth if they got into the wrong hands might really shock you.

A more normal application might be the access to financial information when and if one spouse predeceases the other. So believe it or not, you don't have the legal authority to even access your spouse's accounts

unless you have the proper language in your living trusts and wills and powers of attorney. So the laws have changed significantly in recent years and everyone, including myself, should be calling their estate planning attorney tomorrow, right after listening to this conversation, because this stuff is really, really important and there's just been a lot of changes.

Our guest on today's show is Jamie Hopkins, and he's a wealth of knowledge when it comes to digital estate planning and how to prepare and protect yourself. So you're going to learn a lot. But he's also the author of a new book called Rebellion.

rewiring the way you think about retirement. And it's really good. It's a really quick, easy read. He takes really important retirement topics and he breaks them down really simply. So I have five signed copies from Jamie sitting on my desk and I want to give them away. So if you want a copy, all you have to do is send me an email to podcast at

at youstaywealthy.com, podcast at youstaywealthy.com. And in the subject line, just write, I want the book. And the first five emails I get, I'll get your address and I'll send you a signed copy. So with all that out of the way, let's get into the interview. ♪

I thought I would start with, I caused a little bit of a stir on Twitter today, just trying to give you a shout out for coming on the podcast. So I don't know, I think maybe we just start there. I tweeted out that you had written this Forbes article on digital estate planning and just tweeted out this fact from that McAfee study that said the average person in America has over $55,000 in digital assets. And I thought, well, that's a lot of money.

And Carolyn McClanahan, who we both know, made this comment about how the average American only has $63,000 in retirement savings. Too bad they can't take those digital assets and convert them into retirement savings. But she did bring up some interesting questions that I definitely want to talk about today as we dive into digital estate planning. Maybe before we tackle some of Carolyn's comments and some of my questions from that, let's just start with what...

What is a digital asset? Yeah. So when we're talking about digital assets, it's actually a little bit different than what you might think. So a lot of times when I get up and say, hey, we're going to talk about digital assets or digital estate planning, people think their computer, their iPhones, those are really digital storage devices, right? They house information on them.

The other item that often pops into people's head is when I say, oh, your digital assets, people immediately say, oh, Bitcoin. Well, my clients don't have Bitcoin, so I don't worry about it. That's a piece of it. So those things are very tied to it, but it's actually much broader than that. Your digital assets, there's this huge digital footprint that we're creating now, and it's all kinds of information, personal, business, some being true value, some being sentimental value, some being kind of headache-

And risk, which I think there's actually some value in not having those things there too. So it's kind of a broad case, but really digital assets are all that information that's stored online in the cloud out there in the world.

Okay. And what would be just a few basic examples that most traditional people would have in a digital asset? Yeah. So the ones that almost everyone has nowadays, right? Your emails are digital assets, right? Your social media accounts, your Twitter, which we already started talking about, LinkedIn, Facebook, those are digital assets. If you have a website for your

business, digital asset, blogs, all that stuff, online marketing campaigns. Those are all digital assets. Now, again, almost everyone at this point has some email, some online accounts with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn. That's kind of the norm today. I actually think there's some studies out there on how many online accounts people have, and it's pretty staggering. I mean, I wouldn't guess that mine's probably...

easily over 100 now. I actually wouldn't be shocked to hear if I had over 200 online accounts. So...

Yeah. I mean, I use Dashlane as a password manager and I think I've got like 550 usernames and passwords stored in there. It's insane. Yeah. So that, yeah, that actually probably, that sounds about right. There's an insane amount of them, right? And it's actually, you know, just that, how do you store them? How do you track them? How do you know where they all are can be its own challenge. Okay. So we've established kind of just the basics of digital assets and what they are and your email account and social media accounts. Like those are digital assets.

Maybe let's quickly just touch on why are they so important? Why do we even care about these and why are we classifying them as an asset and something that we need to plan around? One of the things is these things do have value. And then we can get into kind of how much value later on, but they do have value. That your email obviously has some value to you, right? It's not necessarily that somebody else sees value in it, but

my bill pay right my clients my consulting work documents all kinds of things are stored right online and that has value to me so i want to make sure that one i have access to it but in the case i become incapacitated i you know go into a coma i die that

perhaps my spouse or my business partners have access to those assets too. In some cases, I've had some younger friends of mine pass away. And one of them, I remember on Facebook, you know, it kept showing up as her birthday. It kept, you know, recommending like, Hey, like the,

nobody's reached out to so-and-so in a while, or you get these notifications on Facebook about somebody. And you'd see people write happy birthday on there, not knowing that she had passed away. And it's kind of awkward and it's even sad for the family. And it's really, somebody might've said, well, there's no value in that.

Well, if a family saw that and is crying over a weekend, I would say, you know what? There was some value in that asset for planning for it. It caused emotional harm later on, which clearly has value then. Risks to some degree when you value things have value. The value of not having to go through that counts for something. And Facebook's done some interesting things. You can memorialize accounts now. So you can actually contact

them with a death certificate and have an account kind of frozen and memorialized. So certain of those things don't happen anymore, right? You don't get the, do you know this person, add them, right? You don't kind of get that odd stuff that doesn't feel great. And there's more places looking at those types of things. But I'm also now like, that's kind of the personal side. I'm going to flip over real quick and talk about as a business side, why this is so important and kind of one of the big mistakes that occurs out there.

And one of the shocking things about digital assets is you agree to a contract when you set it up. And this is kind of the basics, right? We set up an online account and what'd you do? You went from that page that maybe was 45 pages long and you scrolled down to the bottom as fast as humanly possible and hit, I agree. And you can send it to everything to set up your account, right? Now in that we call those terms of service agreements. When you clicked, I agree,

And you went in, one of the things you most likely agreed to is that account, you have a lifetime lease in it and it's non-transferable to anybody else. And so that really sets your ownership rights to it. We really can't change that at any point. So that creates a whole lot of issues with digital assets because we don't own them in the normal sense that we think when we buy something that we own it.

This even came up, there were some articles, and I don't know actually how true this was on the back end, but there were a bunch of articles about Bruce Willis contemplating suing iTunes because he had apparently hundreds of thousands of dollars of downloads and found out that iTunes, you have a lifetime lease in those downloads. You actually don't own them like buying a CD or a record. You can only use them for as long as you're alive. And when you die, you give up that right to the asset.

And he was kind of shocked by that. But that's all very settled law. Those terms of service agreements are controlling contracts and set ownership rights.

And so all that stuff that we think we own, all of a sudden when we die, we don't own it anymore. And really, we can't pass it on to our heirs. And if we're in a business situation and we go set up our email and our individual name and we die, guess what? We can't leave that to the business. We can't transfer it to the business. Legally, we have no ownership right to it anymore, our state or otherwise, or the new business. So kind of

That's an improper kind of titling or ownership of an asset situation. That occurs with other things too. You see business owners put their cars in their name and it's really a business car and things like that. But the same thing can occur out here with digital assets and actually more frequently it occurs.

So these digital assets, they have like a monetary value. You might own a domain that you could actually sell and cash out on, but they also have this like sentimental value, which is hard to place a value on. But I think the third that you kind of touched on that I want to dive into a little bit more is the risk side.

And that's also really hard to quantify. But what is your username and password worth to somebody who might steal it and do something illegally with it? What's the value of that to somebody? And so I think that's the part that I'd like to explore a little bit more and understand. And you had in one of your articles shared this story about

a husband and wife, and the husband passed away. And he was the one that handled all the finances. So maybe you can just quickly tell that story and we can talk about how that could impact anybody. It's probably something that, you know, for estate planners, financial advisors have run into a little bit over the last five or 10 years, but maybe not to the frequency we're going to run into it over the next 10.

That was a couple that I knew that had done some work with. Husband passed away and really ran most of the finances. And a lot of their accounts went digital. And, you know, they did online bill pay and things went to the email. And that's the only place they knew how to get the accounts. It's the only way to recover the passwords. It's the only way to get in. And they couldn't get into the email.

Right. That's a big problem. And that's actually occurring every day at this point that somebody is passing away, you know, ending up in the hospital and the account access point is lost. It's in an email. We don't know where it is. It's not kind of quite the same as right. We might have had a drawer in a house and nobody knew where the key was. Well, eventually somebody can just pop the drawer open.

It's not so easy to pop open Google. It's not so clear that we can do that. And they don't have any legal requirement to pass over the name. And in fact, it's actually prohibited from them to give the username and password over to the non-owner. It's actually against federal law, according to their contract, that it's not transferable. They actually can't give it out to the spouse.

So it creates a whole bunch of challenges. Now, another interesting thing that happens from that is, and I bring up Home Depot as kind of the example there, but Home Depot got hacked a couple of years ago and people say, well, I don't have that much important stuff online, blah, blah, blah. And I say, well, have you ever spent money at Home Depot and

Most homeowners at this point in the U.S. have. And credit card companies reached out to people and said, hey, you need to change your username, your password, delete your account, et cetera, because they got hacked and people are running up fraudulent charges. Well, all of a sudden, husbands passed away, right? Had a Home Depot account. Never thought about that as being a risk or a value. All of a sudden, you're getting fraudulent charges.

they're going to the email, which you're also not checking. It can be months later until actually physical mail for delivery of late payment for months shows up. Maybe you can beat that. You call up the credit card company and say, hey, my husband passed away. Here's a certificate of

I don't think these were his charges. But that's actually like if you're describing what's the worst possible situation you could put your client in, right, is six months after the death of their spouse, all of a sudden fraudulent charges start showing up that they're having to deal with to try to get back ended out.

right? I mean, you actually, it's very hard to draw up like worst case emotions that you're probably going to bring back up right then. That's terrible. And it's, you know, the risk side there is actually larger than the asset is for you, right? Like you don't view a credit card as a large asset for you, but on the black market, right? Or some type of theft of it, all of a sudden you're

If they have enough information and you're not watching it, it does become a big asset to steal, right? Because it's essentially a large line of credit that somebody else has access to and is not planning on paying back. And that becomes a big risk for you. You know, debit cards are actually riskier too.

because they don't always have the same backend protection. So there's a lot of stuff like that going on out there. And I think that's the stuff that actually resonates with a lot of people and like why to do planning for end of life is that, right? Like we don't want our spouse to be sitting around without access to these things, not know what's going on, sitting in the dark, not knowing where the accounts are. If communications are being sent to us, we're not getting them because they're going to our email. You know, that's kind of a scary problem.

And I think it might help a little bit more demonstrate the importance of doing planning.

So the study released by McAfee back in 2013 that says, you know, the average American has over $55,000 in digital assets. Maybe we can all agree that like it's a little misleading, right? Like you can't actually sell a lot of these assets and convert them to cash and fund retirement with these dollars. A lot of this sounds like it's hard to actually quantify and put a dollar amount on, especially something like...

you know, a username and password or social security number, you know, what something is worth on the black market. So maybe just kind of put an end to this conversation that happened on Twitter today, you know, Carolyn had said, I, you know, I have a hard time believing that, you know, most Americans have $55,000 in digital assets.

Is there anything else you want to say about that to try and respond? I actually think I wrote on this many years ago, probably back closer when that came out. I have a little bit trouble believing the median person has somewhere around, you know, 55,000. And I don't remember if it actually says median in the report. I actually think it's a mean number. But that does get skewed a little bit. You know, Amazon...

billion. And when you look at that, I mean, they're essentially a digital asset. They don't have much in the sense of value and anything else. So if you start piecing out like the business pieces that people own, you know, I have, I have like five or six websites. And I think if you added all of those up, I own digital currencies to a lot of them. So, you know, if you kind of added all that up, I might not have 50 grand, but I have some, you know, of actual tangible selling items.

right? I think that's the part that people have a struggle with. But yeah, that McAfee study, anything that's done by somebody who provides a service for something to you, you always have to question a little bit. It's clearly a biased report. They do internet security and they're saying you have a lot of value in your online assets. So I think that's a very fair critique. I think for the most part, though, I think that conversation on Twitter, though, was what I see a lot is I actually think most people

undervalue what they have. So maybe it's not $55,000, but I'll tell you a lot of businesses clearly have $55,000 of online assets, the emails, the value of that, that it would... Because I've done this before and I think I did then, if you lost access to your email completely, you couldn't touch any client files, anything ever again, what would you pay to have that back again?

And I would say I know for a fact that if I lost all of my emails, all of my client communications, right, all of those legal documents I have, it's definitely worth 50 grand, right? Like there's no chance it's not. Now, I can't necessarily go to like a marketplace and sell those things for 50 grand, but it's definitely worth that to me.

There's some aspect of that. And people actually buy, you know, million dollar policies for digital security nowadays, right? Those online theft protection policies. I mean, they sell, I think some employers even offer them as an employee benefit nowadays. People do million dollar ones. So there are people out there thinking they've got a million dollars of at least online presence and digital assets that they want to protect.

And I think the thing that I want to hit home here, most of our listeners are either retired or kind of on their way to retirement and they've held traditional jobs and they're not business owners. And they're sitting here thinking like, I don't own a website. I don't really care about my Yahoo email address. So I think the really important piece here that I think a lot of people forget is the risk component. Again, like what's it worth if somebody else gets their hands on it? And so let's maybe switch gears a little bit and talk about like,

You know, knowing that we're all at risk and that we all have these digital assets that are in fact worth something and could be worth a lot depending on who gets their hands on it. What can we do to start to protect ourselves? And maybe the first question I'll ask is,

If people have gone through the traditional estate planning process, they've met with an estate planner, they've put together their trust, their wills, their powers of attorney, can they consider themselves safe and clear? Or is there something more they need to do? What would you say to that? Yeah, so this will be the single most important thing that I say here. If you went through and worked with an estate planner...

more than two years ago, you can count on not being secure with this. So that's the big piece. And that's really the Forbes article that we were talking about. I mean, that's really the biggest piece that I was trying to get across there is about two years ago, states added new laws. And the new laws say that you can plan for these digital assets. You can give your fiduciary

access points to them. You can't change ownership. That's set by the contract, but you can give fiduciaries access to wind them down, pull out information or money that's yours in a PayPal account, things like that. But you have to affirmatively do it in your documents.

Does it have to be a professional fiduciary or can you assign it to a family member or spouse? Yeah, so it could be a family member or spouse as long as it's done through a legal document. So a lot of executors, right, are family members. And so if you said my spouse is going to be my executor, my child's going to be my executor, they could then be given the ability to do it.

So that's okay. Powers of attorney documents, wills, trusts, all of those could give somebody the ability, but we'd have to do it in some legal format. But these are treated as what we call hot powers. And what that means is a catch-all phrase doesn't work. Saying that my heirs have access to all of my assets at death, which we use language like that in wills and trusts, doesn't cover digital assets.

Unfortunately, the laws say that we have to specifically state it out. So even if we have that all assets, we're going to have to have a standalone clause that says you have access to manage my digital assets in our trust, our power of attorney or will, whatever document. And for some people, we're going to have it in all three for a lot of people. But essentially, all of our documents need to be updated for that.

And it's a little bit scary how few attorneys have updated their documents, too. It was only last year, so 2018, maybe it was the end of 2017, I wrote kind of the ABA guidelines for some of this, too, for the American Bar Association. So they weren't even there until two years ago. So most of the wills, those things that you're using out there from your attorneys, if they're more than two years old, it didn't exist in there.

Yeah, I was just going to ask, why did that take so long? I mean, we're talking 2016. I mean, digital assets have been around a lot longer than that. Do you have any idea what the hang up has been and why it's taken so long to get to where we're at today? Yeah, I mean, it's kind of a couple things together. So one of the things is, generally speaking, the people who died over the last 10 to 15 years didn't have a huge digital footprint.

That's not saying zero, but just generally speaking, most of the people who die in the country are older and had less online accounts. So it wasn't as big of an issue. That's one piece of it. The second piece is the law always lags technology to some degree. I've been writing on digital asset planning since 2011 or 2012.

So at that standpoint, you're thinking, okay, lawyers were talking about this seven, eight years ago, but we didn't even get rules about it until a year or two ago. That's a pretty long delay. Well, they actually did come up with rules a little bit faster. Delaware had one first, and it was pretty –

onerous, I would say, on the service providers. So Delaware passed it. And what happened? Amazon, Google, Facebook, all the big players right at that time jumped on board and said, whoa, states, hold your horses. We need to restart this. So they actually redrafted the entire uniform thing. I mean, 98% redlined or something like that and really rewrote it with more of the service providers in the fold.

And their big concern was transferring ownership. The first one, the draft of it, was more likely to actually allow you to transfer ownership to your heirs. And they said, look, we can't do that. Somebody agreed with the contract. We're not transferring the account to somebody else.

And so they came up with different ways to data dump out, to give fiduciary access points to go in, see what they need to shut the account down, delete information out. So it kind of had its own evolution. And kind of at the federal level, nothing's ever happened with this. I mean, this has actually been entirely state-driven, which sometimes is a good thing, but we essentially got a uniform act. I mean, small modifications from state to state, but generally in

In this case, it's one of those areas where pretty much every state signed on board on the Uniform Act. So if you got your trust and wills and powers of attorney done more than two years ago, let's just say you have that stuff done, even if you did it last month.

It's probably safe to say that you should at least check in with your estate planning attorney or even your financial planner if they have a copy of this stuff to see if this digital asset language is injected into there. Are there specific questions that you should ask? Is it as simple as that? Is there something that you really want to look for? And then...

Maybe on that, should we assume that most estate planners would know how to draw up this language or do we have to be careful who we go to? Unfortunately, from what I've seen, so the way a lot of the estate planning world works is people use form documents as their starting point. I'm an attorney. I did estate planning for a while too. And that's the general starting point. You have some form, you use it, you make modifications.

The reality is I've seen estate planners that are using a form that was built in the 90s for their stuff, and they make small modifications to it. So it's really not that safe to assume, even if you did it in the last couple years, in the last year, in the last six months, that the language is in there. You really do have to ask for it.

You got to say, does this cover my digital assets? Does it give somebody the ability to manage them and wrap them up if I become incapacitated or die? You really do have to ask that. I think the scary part there is to still imagine there's a lot of attorneys that aren't up to speed on this in the estate planning world.

So that's a whole other story about the makeup of the estate planning world, but it's been kind of an aging and dying off profession in the legal community. It's much smaller than it ever was in the past. So you're just not kind of seeing that robust technology and other pieces disrupting it right now. It's kind of just sitting.

So I think there's a lot of laziness going on there, to be honest. So I think when you're working with somebody, you got to ask them specifically, is this updated for, you know, I heard there was a new legislation about digital assets and it impacted my will. Is this up to date for that? I actually think going that far is probably best.

Hopefully, right? It's not something an attorney is going to argue with you once you bring it up, but it's definitely one of those things. It's worth going down that path to make sure that everything's actually covered in there that you thought would be covered.

Yeah. I mean, it's definitely got my wheels turning. We did all of our estate planning stuff, gosh, in the last few years. And I have no idea what it says in terms of digital assets. And I actually have real tangible digital assets I think I could sell. So I think it's really important. But for me, the scary part is the risk side. It's really frightening. And you already alluded to it.

if you lost a spouse the last thing that you want to deal with is any of this stuff just like we talk about how if you know a family member died the last thing you want to do is have to go through probate and hire a probate attorney like that's what we want to avoid and you know getting bills in the mail for you know overdue charges that are fraudulent like you don't want to deal with that stuff so

That's the part that really interests me here and really affects just about everybody. So, okay, so we go back to the estate attorneys, maybe find an estate attorney near us that specializes in this area. That sounds like it's definitely a step

Number one, are there other things that people can do to protect these assets? I know I mentioned that I use Dashlane as my password manager and I know there are others out there and I forget what they call it, but like I've set my wife up in there. So if something ever happened to me, she is allowed to access my Dashlane and get to all my passwords.

I'm not really giving her fiduciary access, but yeah, is there anything, is that something worth considering? Yeah, so that's actually a pretty good idea. So I'll bring up a couple of things about that real quick. One, I think generally speaking, you've got to track your logins, you've got to track your passwords, you've got to track the accounts you have.

Because it's very hard to find them, right? It's not so easy to go to the local bank and say, "My dad passed away. How many accounts did he have here? I know he used this bank." And they say three, and then you go through that process, right? I can't really go anywhere online to figure out how many accounts anyone has. So we do have to track them.

The username and passwords are the keys to it. If we don't have the keys, we can't get in. And so we need to be able to track those. There are online service providers, as you said, that are offering that now as kind of a planning tool. There are online digital estate planning services too that go even a little bit further. You can even set up emails to be sent out when you die to people. They'll actually go in and delete emails.

accounts for you automatically. And kind of what you alluded to is what they've kind of closely said is there's some type of almost beneficiary designation attached to an online service account. And they kind of allow for that. There's some

Lingering questions, though, about the legality of that in the sense that that contract that you clicked and agreed to with Google. One of the other things you agreed to with that was that you will not share your password or username with anyone. And if you do, they can actually sue you for damages that would result from somebody accessing the account illegally because they're not a authorized user.

They don't have ownership rights in that account. Now, generally speaking, right? So I laid out the release. You're like, well, that sounds like a great plan, but now they can sue me if my spouse enters the account. The reality is that's not occurring, right? Google and Facebook and these places aren't tracking down spouses that are entering their spouse's accounts, right? That's not a real thing. Well, really quick, you're an attorney and I'm in the state of California here, community property state. How does that play into this? Yeah, I mean, technically they would, they should own half of it

However, being that it's still a lifetime lease based off of that person's life, you would still say that the asset would terminate at the end of the life, right? So like you still have life interests out there. Like if you got an annuity for life on a single life, when that first person dies, the annuity still ends, right? It's the same setup as that. When you agree to that contract, technically they have some half ownership in it, but it's still based off the original account person's life.

So there's really nothing to pass over at that point, right? Life interests end at the end of the life. So I don't think it helps us in any real meaningful way. You know, I think it'll be fun one day for divorce attorneys. They haven't really had to hop into this too much. That'll be a whole nother world. You know, if you own half of it, how do we split it up? Jeez, God, I didn't think about that.

Kind of cut you off there. You were kind of talking more about the password manager, Dashlane, all that stuff. Is there anything else you wanted to add there that we should consider? Yeah. I mean, one of the other things that's useful there that a lot of attorneys recommend. So I know there's the online service providers. There's some people that feel very uncomfortable with doing that. It's kind of like creating the Fort Knox of something you'd want to break into, right? Like if you store all 400 of your passwords in one spot, right?

where would I want to try to hack, like each individual account, or would I go after that place? Now, generally, they have pretty good encryption, and I think all that's getting better and better. It's getting harder to some degree to hack it, but we have more advanced hackers all the time. So what some people recommend is some type of external hard drive, right, that's not

like a Bluetooth that's not a Wi-Fi one that actually has to be wired in. So when you unplug it, there's like if somebody gets your... I know people that save it on their computer and have an Excel file that says username and password. Well, if somebody hacks your computer, they have all that. But an external drive can actually be a nice way to store that a little bit safer. So my mom was in town a few weeks ago and I was just helping her with some of her personal finances. And

We obviously needed her usernames and passwords to get into some of her financial websites. And she pulls out her iPhone and she shows me that she stores all of her usernames and passwords in iPhone notes. But she thinks that she's hiding them because the title of the note is prayer requests. And then all of her usernames...

So she thought that was her secure way of storing usernames and passwords. And I don't know, I got a good laugh out of it. You know, I'd say that's not the least secure thing I've ever heard.

Yeah. But yeah, the notes, a lot of people store passwords in notes and that is a, you know, it was actually an incredibly unsafe place to store anything. You know, while your phone's locked, it's actually pretty safe. But a lot of that stuff now uploads. I mean, a lot of people do the auto upload to the cloud too. You know, you're seeing just more and more technology of people being able to copy devices, pull stuff, you know, walk up behind them, tap the phone and

pool information. So, you know, I think there's some risk with that. Obviously, that's not occurring to, you know, normal people and as a high level risk. But, you know, it's kind of all just tied together that there's a lot of risks out there when it comes to digital assets, postmortem theft, digital theft.

That's all huge right now. I mean, and if you kind of mentioned to people who own actual assets online that you could sell by exchange, if you own digital currencies, which is not kind of...

everybody, but a lot of people nowadays. And we just saw the one digital currency site, the owner died and nobody can get into it. And it's like, that's a perfect example of this. And there's hundreds of millions of dollars locked up because nobody has the password and can't ever get in. And that's the end. Maybe somebody will hack it one day, 20 years from now. But it just represents a lot of planning opportunities. And

As you said, just a lot of headaches that you don't want to have to cause your heirs. I think to a lot of degrees, that's just the best piece of it is like, let's make sure this stuff's taken care of, that our credit cards, social security, personal information, logins aren't sitting out there in the world unprotected, unmonitored when we pass away. That somebody is actually going to wrap that up and get rid of it, pass it to the people that need it.

Yeah. And I think one more thing I'll mention in regards to these password managers that I think is really helpful, at least while people are still alive, you know, you brought up the Home Depot story. One of the great things about Dashlane and LastPass and these things is it will alert you and say, Hey, we see that you have a Home Depot login. Home Depot was recently hacked. You

You need to go and update your password at the homedepot.com website. And so I think it's really neat. It kind of gamifies it too. It gives you a security score, like how secure all of your usernames and passwords are. And so from a cybersecurity standpoint, while you're still alive, I think that's really helpful. Yeah. And not having Kanye's password is probably helpful too, right? So...

Do you have any thoughts on side letters of instruction? Is that just an alternative to maybe using a dashlane or a last pass? Yeah. So those additional letters of instruction, things like that. So yeah, there's a bunch of those kind of online sites that are popping up. Giving people instructions can be useful. Some of that actually goes, you might have

not that people always want to cop to this stuff, but let's say you online gamble, right? Here's a really good example. You do a lot of online gambling, but your spouse doesn't like that you do that. So you don't tell them that you online gamble, right? So you kind of hide it a little bit. Not saying that's a good thing to do, but it clearly happens.

Well, when you die, right, you want the next thing to find out when your spouse goes in that they're seeing your online gambling stuff. So sometimes people give notes to say, hey, delete this or pass this over. So those things are out there.

There was something that was created called Five Wishes at one point, which was a similar thing, kind of passing on notes to people, you know, on what you wanted to happen. And, you know, maybe you're maybe not there legally binding, but it gives some people some guidance on kind of what you were hoping to accomplish. You know, we actually use Five Wishes in our practice. We buy the pamphlets and we give them to clients.

It's really, really well received. And I think it is a legal document. You can get it notarized and deliver it to all the professionals in your life. Give one a copy to your doctor and put one in your safe. And there are really, really hard questions to answer. It's not a super fun process to go through. But we've all heard some bad stories. And it doesn't matter how old or young you are because anything can happen at any time. So yeah, I forgot about five wishes, at least in terms of this.

this conversation. But yeah, that's a good idea as well. Yeah. It's funny though. Yeah. We just talk about stuff. You're like, yeah, I use that too. Yeah. It essentially works as a power of attorney or living will under state law in most cases. So that one is a legal document. Sometimes when you leave those side notes though, they're actually not binding on anyone, right? If somebody becomes a fiduciary over it, that stuff isn't actually legal, right? So they could disregard all of it.

We see that problem sometimes when somebody says like, hey, I'm going to make my brother the fiduciary of the trust. I'm going to write down everything over here on this notepad I want you to do. And then they disregard all of it because it's not in a legal document. Those side notes, that's the one kind of challenge with them. But yeah, that's why I kind of brought up things like five wishes. A couple of them have been developed over time that are pretty interesting and actually do allow us to do a little bit more. Cool. So to recap, I mean, I think we've settled on

just about everybody has digital assets. Even if you're retired at home doing nothing, you do have digital assets if you have usernames and passwords and a social security number. So everybody has these digital assets and maybe the three best ways to protect them is some sort of password manager, contacting your attorney, getting your wills, trust, powers of attorney updated to include this new language, and then maybe consider a side letter of instruction or using something like five wishes or

I think to me, the most important, my biggest takeaway from this conversation is everybody tomorrow needs to call or email their estate planning attorney or find a new one to make sure that all the language is up to date. Anything else you want to add in terms of digital estate planning? No, I mean, I think that's really the big pieces, right? When I talk about digital estate planning, what I'm trying to do is just bring that awareness, right? It's just people don't think about this. They don't think it's a big risk. They don't think they have a lot of

assets than you do. Small business owners have a ton. Individuals have some. And if you can listen to a podcast, it means you have some, right? I don't care if you're able to listen to us talk right now, you have some. And you probably have more than you think. And it probably represents a bigger risk and value

right? Just your heirs, you, your family, then you can really kind of comprehend. Yeah. Very good point. Well, I appreciate you shedding some light on this topic that probably doesn't get enough attention. So thank you very much. We will link to everything in the show notes. So everybody can go there and download some of the stuff and read some of these articles. But the last thing I just want to talk about really quick is you recently wrote a book. I love the title of it. It's called

rewirement, kind of a spin on retirement. And the subtitle is rewiring the way you think about retirement. So maybe you can just give us kind of a short, just quick summary of the book, you know, why you set out to write it and then maybe where people can find it if they're interested. Yeah. So first part is kind of why I wrote is a lot of the research I've done over the years has been on literacy rates and kind of the impact that has on planning. There's clear correlations between how much you know and how much planning you do, but it's not the only driver.

And we just kind of realized there's all these behavioral biases, misconceptions that get in the way from us to do better retirement planning. And so I wrote the book as that idea that we've got to change the way we think about retirement planning because it's very different than saving for retirement.

And the books available on Amazon, that's really the easiest place to get it. So that's where everyone buy it. Back to digital assets, right? You can get your Kindle copy on there. That's the cheapest one. So I usually recommend that because it's a better financial planning way to do things. But yeah, you can buy a regular copy. I sell bulk copies to firms and things like that too. But easiest place is just grab it on Amazon.

Great. So I'm not a published author. I've never written a book. I've written some blog posts and things like that. But I'm fascinated by people who have been able to actually sit down and write and publish. I always like to ask, is there one or two things that you learned recently?

through the process of writing this book, like maybe even like a new concept that you learned or you learned that you never want to want to write a book again? Any big thoughts that came out of that process? I did not learn that I didn't write want to write another book again. I actually have three textbooks, two ebooks and then that book. But that's really the first book I could like hand out to people. You don't hand textbooks to somebody. I'm actually working on three more books. But one, the big lesson I learned through this one is hiring

a digital editor or whatever you want to call it, a marketing person that can actually jazz up the inside of the book. Books look way better over time now because people are really good at that. They make the layout of the book just look phenomenal. Trying to do that yourself just takes a lot of time. And I think if anyone wants to write a book, it's kind of my one piece of advice if somebody wants to write a book is write something that you love.

And it's really easy. If you try to write a book on something that you think is important, but you don't really care about, it's going to be really hard. If you just write a book on something you love, right, it just flows. It's so much easier. I often hear people say, well, I've got like these four ideas. And I say, well, which one of them do you love? And they say, well, none of them really. And I was like, then don't write a book.

So as soon as you find that topic that you love talking about, thinking about writing, write a book. It's fun. You'll learn something. As you said, I learned a lot doing it. I mean, I talked to a lot of people, but it was overall an enjoyable process. Awesome.

Awesome. Well, I've got my signed copy sitting here. It was great to run into you a couple of weeks ago and I appreciate you giving that to me. I really enjoyed the book. It's full of great information. As I mentioned at the beginning of the show, we'll be giving some copies away, but we'll also link to Amazon as well if people want to pick up copies. So I

I really, really appreciate you coming on today. I really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you so much. And I don't know, maybe we'll have you on again in the future someday. Yeah, it was a blast. I appreciate it. And yeah, it was great running into you at the conference too. Always fun to see you.

As a reminder, I have five signed copies of Jamie's new book called Rewirement, Rewiring the Way You Think About Retirement. And I want to give these away. So if you want a copy of Jamie's new book, all you have to do is shoot me an email at podcast at youstaywealthy.com. And in the subject line, just write, I want the book.

And the first five emails I get, I'll go ahead and grab your address from you and ship those out. So I hope you enjoyed the interview today. I certainly learned a lot. I have some action items on my list. Jamie has a lot of information to share, and so I hope to bring him back on the show to dive into some more topics like this. Thanks as always for listening.