How LegacyArmour Can Help You In Preserving Your Legacy?

What Are Digital Assets? and What Do They Have to Do With My Legacy?

Digital assets such as family photos, legal documents, website and social media access and special video/ message instructions have a high sentimental and consequently monetary value to the information owner. The monetary value is a result of one simple question: “What would you be willing to pay to recover all of your family memories. private information if you lost it or if your loved ones could not access that information?”

In 2013, McAfee estimated the value of digital assets per person at roughly $35,000 worldwide. Failure to properly manage digital assets could result in a financial loss to individuals and small business owners especially when he/she try to sell an asset such as real estate or company to create retirement income. Additionally, some digital assets could remain the property of the retiree and may even provide a continuing source of income throughout retirement.

One of the most important considerations in planning for digital assets is the legal right of the owner to transfer the property. In some cases, the digital service provider (e.g. Google & Yahoo!) will allow the individual to sell his or her digital website, domain name, etc., to another person. However, in other cases, these assets are specifically deemed non-transferable for any reason by a third-party service agreement. These legal details should be reviewed before setting up a webpage or creating any digital asset that might later be transferred. If one online service provider does not allow the transferability rights your client desires, identify a company that does.

Key Areas of Legacy Protection

• Identification of Digital Assets: In order to maximize the value of a client’s digital assets, one must first identify the assets.  This process could be expedited by utilizing a fact finding process or a checklist of questions that can help pinpoint potential sources of digital assets. A best practice would be to consolidate and catalog all of the digital assets under categories such as family, business, legal, health .. etc.
• Valuation of Digital Assets:  Once this determination has been made, it is crucial to do a careful valuation of the assets in question. What monetary value do the assets have to the client? Do these digital assets have a marketplace or value to third parties? If so, could the assets provide an income stream today, or later in retirement? Once the client’s assets have been identified and valued, it is imperative to rank the financial and sentimental priority of these assets to the client. If the client uses his or her social media website and profile for both personal and business purposes, he or she might not be willing to sell or transfer this asset in the future. Conversely, pure business assets might have low sentimental value but rank high as financial assets.
• Secure Storage of Digital Assets: Secure storage and access to digital assets while the owner is alive and after they pass is very important. Cloud storage is not secure, some encrypted storage providers charge expensive fees and none of them provide a monitoring platform that detects if it is time to notify others designated by the digital asset owner if something happened to them.
• Unclaimed Benefits Avoidance / Probate: Unclaimed life insurance benefits in the United States topped $1 Billion in 2013 and continues to grow.  Unclaimed policies deprive recipients of their benefit and diminish an insurance company’s market reputation.

The LegacyArmour Value Proposition