Getting a Will is a real accomplishment. Most people never do it. But there’s a gap almost nobody talks about: a Will addresses who inherits what. It says almost nothing about where things are, how to find them, or what to do with them. For the person left to figure all of that out, that gap becomes a serious problem.
Consider this: according to the 2025 Trust and Will Estate Planning Report, which surveyed 10,000 adults, 83% of Americans recognize the importance of estate planning, yet only 31% actually have a Will. And of those who do have a Will, most have stopped there.
The problem is that a Will was never designed to cover the complexity of a modern digital life. It doesn’t know about your online banking portal, your cloud photo library, your airline miles, or the dozen subscriptions still charging your card every month. None of that ends up in the document. And none of it is something your executor can figure out from a filing cabinet.
This is where digital estate planning fills the gap. Not instead of a Will. Alongside it.
Beyond the Will: Why Your Family Needs More Than a Document
Think of your Will as the destination. A digital estate planner is the turn-by-turn directions for getting there.
Your Will designates who receives your home, your accounts, your heirlooms. But it doesn’t tell anyone where those accounts are. It doesn’t list the subscriptions, the digital wallets, or the insurance policy in a drawer nobody knows about. It doesn’t walk your executor through what to do in week one, week four, or month six. I should know, when I was settling my Dad's estate, I luckily stumbled upon an insurance policy that wasn't listed in any of the estate documents. I almost missed it.
Research shows that fewer than 25% of Americans have designated digital estate beneficiaries, and many individuals have at least one form of digital wealth not included in their estate plan. Anyone with a bank account, a phone, and an email address has a digital footprint that needs to be planned for.
What Is a Digital Estate Planner, Exactly?
A digital estate planner is the user manual for your non-physical life. It’s a structured system that catalogs the accounts, credentials, subscriptions, digital assets, and practical details that a Will leaves out, and pairs that inventory with clear guidance for the person who will eventually need to act on it.
Done well, it gives your executor a clear starting point instead of a scavenger hunt. It tells your family where to look, what exists, and how to access it. It covers the things that change too often to belong in a formal estate document, and the things that were never designed to belong there in the first place.
Two Situations Where This Matters Most
If you're planning ahead
Many people reach a realization after completing their Will: the document is done, but the people named in it still wouldn’t know where to find anything. Bank accounts, insurance policies, online profiles, stored passwords, a safety deposit box they opened twenty years ago. It’s all somewhere. But “somewhere” isn’t good enough when someone is grieving and trying to close an estate at the same time.
The goal here is simple: leave a clear, organized record so your family doesn’t have to piece together your financial life from mail and guesswork. A central source of truth that can be updated as things change, and that your executor can actually find and use.
If you’re settling an estate right now
Even with a valid Will in hand, most first-time executors quickly discover that the document provides no roadmap for the actual work of settlement. Closing bank accounts. Notifying the IRS. Inventorying a home. Canceling subscriptions. Figuring out which debts are legitimate and which are not.
This is sometimes called the second trauma of estate administration: active grief compounded by intense administrative pressure, without a clear guide for what to do or in what order to do it. Research from Vanilla (2024) found that more than a third of U.S. adults say they or someone they know experienced family conflict because of inadequate estate preparation. Probate alone can consume up to 10% of an estate’s value when things go sideways.
A step-by-step digital roadmap built for executors addresses this directly. Not a vague checklist. A guided, organized workflow that tells you what needs to happen in the first week, the first month, and beyond.
What Actually Gets Missed
Most people think of digital assets and picture cryptocurrency or an online brokerage account. Something that shows up on a statement. But that’s rarely what causes problems.
The assets that get missed most often include:
• Loyalty points and airline miles, which can represent thousands of dollars in value and expire if no claim is made
• Cloud storage accounts containing decades of photos and documents, which can become permanently inaccessible without login credentials
• Recurring subscriptions still charging the estate months after a death, with no one knowing they exist
• Payment app balances in Venmo, PayPal, or Cash App, which don’t transfer automatically and are subject to escheatment if left unclaimed
• Online-only bank accounts that send no paper statements and leave no trail in a filing cabinet
• Domain names and online business assets that expire on a schedule nobody is watching
None of these require wrongdoing or negligence. They just require someone not knowing. And when that information lives only in the account holder’s head, it dies with them.
What a Good Digital Estate Plan Covers
A useful digital estate plan goes beyond passwords. It should cover:
• Every financial account, including online-only accounts and payment apps, with the institution name and an identifier your executor can use
• Insurance policies and where to find the documents
• Digital subscriptions and auto-pay accounts
• Cloud storage services and the email address tied to each
• Physical details that don’t belong in a Will: spare keys, alarm codes, storage units, service providers
• Personal wishes and instructions that a Will’s formal structure can’t capture
• A plain-language roadmap for the executor, organized by timeline
This isn’t a replacement for an attorney or a formal estate document. Those still matter. It’s everything that sits alongside them: the practical, operational layer that makes the legal layer actually workable.
How One Step After Helps
One Step After was built to fill exactly this gap. The platform guides you through more than 700 data points across 13 aspects of estate life, covering every category of financial account, digital asset, insurance policy, personal property, and practical household detail. It’s organized so that your executor can find what they need without a scavenger hunt.
Alongside the guided workbook, the platform includes a 70-step settlement roadmap for executors, a secure document vault, and Lysi, an AI guide trained specifically on estate planning and settlement resources to answer questions in plain language.
The whole thing is designed to be worked through at your own pace, by you and your family together, without needing a professional to guide every decision.
A Will tells your family who gets what. One Step After makes sure they can actually find it.
Sources
Trust and Will 2025 Estate Planning Report (10,000 respondents, January 2025): trustandwill.com/learn/estate-planning-report-2025
American Bar Association: Digital estate beneficiary statistics cited in Dr. Lami, Top Trends in Estate Planning for 2025
Vanilla 2025 State of Estate Planning Report: justvanilla.com/blog/estate-planning-statistics-2025