Estate planning sounds like lawyers and leather chairs. Most of it isn’t. The largest part is a list of ordinary steps — naming a person here, turning on a tool there — that together decide whether your family spends a hard month or a hard year. This checklist is the whole shape of it, in order, with a guide linked wherever you want the full version.
1. Take the inventory
Everything else on this list hangs on one document: the complete list of what you have and where it lives. Bank and retirement accounts, brokerage and insurance, property and vehicles, the online accounts and subscriptions, the safe deposit box. For each, the institution’s name and how to reach it is the core; account numbers are optional everywhere, and passwords belong nowhere on this list.
If you want the asset-by-asset version — what matters for each kind of account and what your family will be asked for — the library has a guide for each: bank accounts, brokerage, IRAs, employer plans, life insurance, real estate, vehicles, savings bonds, and crypto.
2. Name beneficiaries everywhere it’s offered
This is the highest-value hour on the checklist, because a beneficiary form quietly does two things: it moves the asset straight to the person you picked, outside probate — and it overrides your will for that account. Payable-on-death on bank accounts. Transfer-on-death on brokerage accounts, on vehicle titles where your state offers it, and on real estate deeds where that exists. Beneficiary designations on IRAs, employer plans, and life insurance.
Two disciplines make it work. Name them everywhere the form exists — an account without one falls back to the estate and the wait that comes with it. And keep them current: the form on file wins, whatever the will says, and forms outlive marriages, divorces, and goodwill.
3. Turn on the provider legacy tools
The big online providers each built a way to name someone now who can ask for your account later. They’re free, they take minutes, and under the legal framework most states have adopted, instructions set through these tools come first — ahead of the will. Google’s Inactive Account Manager (choose who’s told, and what they can download). Apple’s Legacy Contact (an access key plus a death certificate opens photos, messages, and files). Meta’s legacy contact and memorialization settings. OneDrive’s digital legacy (a code that grants read-only access to your files). The online accounts guide walks through each one — what it hands over, and what it never does.
4. Settle the password-manager question
Your password manager is the front door to nearly every account you own, which makes its succession plan the single most important decision here. Bitwarden builds the answer in — Emergency Access lets a person you name request entry after a waiting period you set. 1Password deliberately doesn’t; its answer is the Emergency Kit, a printed document you give to someone you trust. Either works. What doesn’t is leaving the question unanswered, because a manager with no way in turns one lost password into every lost password. The same online accounts guide covers both.
5. Write the instructions
Forms decide who receives things. They say nothing about what you actually want — which account closes and which keeps the photos, who to call first, what you’d want done differently than the default. That layer is a letter, not a form: written in your words, addressed to the people you named, specific enough to act on. It doesn’t need to be long. It needs to exist, and it needs to say where things are and what you want done with each.
6. Put the map somewhere findable
An inventory nobody can find is no inventory. Whatever form yours takes — a document, a sealed envelope with the attorney, a service built for exactly this — two tests apply. Someone you trust knows it exists, and it reaches the right people at the right time: not scattered across inboxes today, and not locked in a drawer only you can open. This is the layer Trust Relay is built to hold — the map and the instructions, kept private and current, delivered to the people you name only after careful verification. Whatever you use, apply the two tests.
7. Review once a year
A plan like this drifts. Accounts open and close, people marry and divorce, and the tools themselves move — the Treasury retired its bond-search tool in 2025, insurers and credit unions change their rules, providers rename their legacy settings. An hour a year keeps the whole thing true: re-read the inventory, re-check the beneficiary forms, and confirm the tools you turned on still exist and still say what you mean. Put it next to something you already do annually, and let it be boring. Boring is the goal.
The inventory, the forms, the tools, the instructions, the map — an evening, once a year. The alternative is a year of someone else’s evenings.
Common questions
What belongs on a digital estate planning checklist?
Seven things: an inventory of every account, policy, and property; beneficiary designations on everything that offers them; the provider legacy tools (Google, Apple, Meta, OneDrive) turned on; a succession plan for the password manager; written instructions for the people you name; a map kept somewhere it will actually be found; and a yearly review to keep all of it true.
Isn’t a will enough on its own?
Usually not, for three reasons. Beneficiary forms — payable-on-death, transfer-on-death, retirement and insurance designations — generally control those accounts regardless of what the will says. A provider’s own legacy tool, where you’ve set one, outranks the will too. And a will was never meant to hold secrets: it passes through executors, lawyers, and courts, so passwords don’t belong in it. A will is one layer of the plan, not the whole plan.
Do I need a lawyer for digital estate planning?
Not for most of this checklist — the inventory, the beneficiary forms, the provider tools, and the password-manager plan are all free and self-serve. Where a qualified attorney earns their fee is the legal layer: the will, any trust, and the power-of-attorney wording that authorizes a fiduciary to reach digital accounts under your state’s version of RUFADAA. That part is state law, and the wording is worth getting right.
How often should the plan be reviewed?
Once a year is the habit that keeps it honest — plus any time life changes: a marriage, a divorce, a death in the family, a new account, a closed one. Provider tools and official processes also shift (they are company policy, not law), so a yearly pass re-checks that what you set up still exists and still says what you mean.
The checklist, kept
Steps one, five, six, and seven — the inventory, the instructions, the map, the review — are what a Trust Relay membership keeps alive: a private, current map of where everything lives, with your instructions attached, checked in on quietly, and delivered only to the people you chose, only when it’s needed.