What counts as a digital asset?

The problem is that most of your life is now spread across accounts, apps, and devices — and the map of where it all lives exists in exactly one place: your head.

The good news is that “digital asset” isn’t as technical as it sounds. It’s just anything you’d want someone to be able to find, or that you’d want handled a certain way. Here’s a plain-language checklist to jog your memory — no jargon, no legal terms.

Money & finance

The accounts that hold or move your money, plus the ones quietly running in the background:

• Checking, savings, and credit cards
• Brokerage, retirement, and investment accounts
• Crypto or digital wallets
• Insurance policies (auto, home, health, life)
• Subscriptions and anything on autopay — the small recurring charges nobody remembers signing up for

Accounts & access

The logins that unlock everything else. Your email and phone are the master keys — most other passwords reset through them:

• Your primary email (and any old ones still tied to accounts)
• Your phone — the one your login codes arrive at
• The app or number your login codes arrive at
• Cloud storage (iCloud, Google Drive, Dropbox)
• Your password manager, if you use one

Work & business

If you earn online, these are real assets — and they’re the easiest to lose track of:

• Payment tools (Stripe, PayPal, Shopify)
• Course platforms, ad accounts, client tools
• Domains and websites
• Any income source that runs through an account only you can reach

Creative & digital presence

The parts of your life that can matter more than money:

• Social media accounts
• Domains and websites
• Years of photos and videos in a cloud service
• Anything you’ve made that lives online

The things only you know

Not every important thing is an account. A lot of it is just where things are:

• Where the will and important documents are kept
• Where a spare key or a safe is
• Which folder the insurance cards live in
• The note that says what you’d want done about any of it

One rule worth keeping: you’re mapping where things are, never the passwords themselves. A good plan is a table of contents, not a vault.

What you don’t have counts too

No safe deposit box? No life insurance? No crypto? Add that to your plan. A list of what you don’t have is just as useful as a list of what you do — it saves someone from hunting for something that was never there in the first place.

The hard part isn’t the list — it’s getting it out of your head

Reading a checklist is easy. Actually writing it all down is the part that feels like a weekend project, which is why most people never start.

That’s the whole reason we built The NextOfKin App the way we did. Instead of handing you a blank page, it asks you one small thing at a time — which phone do your login codes go to? which account pays the mortgage? — and a plan takes shape around your answers. You answer one thing, and stop whenever you like. It stays private to you.

If any line on this checklist made you think “oh — I should add that to my plan,” that’s the nudge.