A photograph of a woman wearing a white shirt and navy blazer smiling into the camera, guest judith kolberg
Episode 133 – Why everybody needs a digital estate plan with guest Judith Kolberg

We all have an information afterlife. Websites, social media, cloud accounts and other information that goes on without us after we die. What if you suddenly died or became incapacitated? Would your Executor, Power of Attorney, or family know about the existence of your “invisible” online and cloud-based accounts, the ones with no statements or paper trail?
Does your spouse know how to how to log-in into the web of automatic transactions of your checking, savings and other accounts if you become incapacitated? Does your Executor know your password and other log-in information? While your family is planning your funeral and grieving your loss, criminals could be hijacking your website or social media accounts. Do you know how to protect yourself? Because we all have an information afterlife we all need a Digital Estate Plan to address these issues.
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Transcript of this podcast episode
Intro  0:07  
Welcome to today's episode of The declutter hope podcast, your channel for super easy, no nonsense advice on how to declutter and organise your home. Please welcome your hosts professional organisers, Ingrid Johnson and Lesley Spellman.

Ingrid  0:22  
Hello, and welcome listeners to Episode 133 of the declutter hub Podcast. I'm Ingrid. In today's episode, I'm talking to Judith Kohlberg who pioneered the Atlanta based company file heads professional organisers, in 1989. In 1990, she founded the National Study Group on chronic disorganisation, the precursor to the Institute for challenging disorganisation. Judith is credited with launching an entire field of professional organising, specifically dedicated to addressing the needs of individuals who are challenged by chronic disorganisation respected by her peers as an industry futurist and thought leader Judy has detected many trends in the fields, including digital estate planning, add and disorganisation, disaster preparedness, and insights into hoarding behaviour. Her innovative organising methods are described in her books that have sold over half a million copies in five countries. And your depth of experience and humorous delivery has made her a popular international speaker. So welcome, Judith.

Judith  1:44  
So much. I'm so happy to be here. Well, it's great.

Ingrid  1:48  
I am honoured to say the least I'm not gonna lie listeners when I saw Judas, at first, when we kind of started talking, I was like, I feel like I'm in the presence of royalty. I mean, you

Judith  1:59  
are. Great, thank you. All a pleasure. Right up there in the ranks of royalty tip. Oh,

Ingrid  2:09  
well, we're working on it working on it. Now do this, we know that many professional organisers worldwide listen to the show, too. And they probably expect us to talk about challenging this organisation since that is the field you are renowned for. But I have asked you to talk about why everybody needs a digital estate plan today. And I want to explain why to our listeners. So I of course, had heard from Judith and I was delighted that she was one of the speakers at the Naples Conference in Atlanta back in 2016. And her topic was the digital estate plan. And to be honest, it just blew my mind. Both the content and the delivery was spot on. And it was the first time I've actually heard anyone talk about a digital estate plan. And since it's such an important topic, I'm delighted you're here to tell our listeners all about it, because everybody needs to have one. But I don't think anybody realises it. So let's start at the beginning. Judith, what is a digital estate plan?

Judith  3:14  
You know, I think you can answer this best by asking yourself, What if you what if you suddenly died, you know, or you became incapacitated? And the question is, you know, would your your spouse or your executor or your power of attorney? Would they even know about the existence of what I call these invisible accounts that we now have, you know, this stuff that's online. And in the cloud, actually, we have often no statements for them. There's no paper trail like they used to be in the old days. And I'm not advocating that we go backwards, don't get me wrong, but it's just that there's no way for anybody else to track them if there isn't some tangible record of them. So that's in essence, what a digital estate plan is. And it's also valuable because we have all of these. It's kind of a web of invisible transactions that we do, right? So you move money from your checking account, it pays for bills online, and then you have money that goes from your savings account into your retirement account. You have investments account and there's all this money in motion. And again, there's no tracking of it, unless you're handling it yourself or you have you know an accountant who's doing that for you, but that's not going to help the people who are going to step in for you when you're incapacitated. Or you know, when you die you for your estate so it serves that purpose to and then finally the digital estate plan is all about you know, we live in this world of passwords and codes and logging in Information and all of that stuff. And were so paranoid about protecting it, and so forth and so on that we forget that nobody else knows these things. And there has to be some way for someone else in your life to learn these things in to say, in a safe way. So that's what a digital estate plan does. It makes your information that now completely invisible, more accessible, so that if something happens for you, you know that you can get your ducks in a row.

Ingrid  5:32  
Okay, so my next question was, why do people need one but you kind of already answered my question was saying, it's especially when you get incapacitated, or you suddenly pass away or when you are passing away, and you've not people in your family have known you're going to pass away. But still, everybody is so busy with other things, they kind of forget to ask all these questions, right? No, I

Judith  5:56  
mean, here you are, your family is, you know, grieving your loss, right, planning a funeral. And meanwhile, there's all this information out there that I call our information afterlife, right? It goes on without us, we may have perished, but it's still out there, your social media accounts is still up, your email is still up, your websites are still up, this stuff is still out there. And it's vulnerable to, you know, cybercrime, and especially when your family is preoccupied with grief. So that's another reason to have it. And that's when to have it. It's kind of too late. When you're incapacitated, or you die, you definitely want to do it now. So I'm especially glad that you're bringing this up for the public. Now, this is really important to do preemptively.

Ingrid  6:47  
It's interesting, because a lot of people are, I think, afraid to talk about what happens when you pass away. And my mother she in is a very organised woman. And I think I know everything that I've learned that know from her. And the funeral company was very surprised that she when she wanted to sort out her funeral, and those that are like, Oh, I'm so sorry to hear, are you ill? No, she's like, No, absolutely fine. But I just want to sort myself out. I like I like her too. But I mean, it's just so she's made this whole folder already with like a big cross. On the back, we're kind of this is the paperwork, he is where my gas, water, electricity is, and all those things, because she's kind of ahead of the game. But a lot of people find it very difficult to talk about these things don't,

Judith  7:38  
you know, it raises the it's kind of like making a will, right, it's raises the issue of your mortality, you know, this isn't going to happen. I mean, obviously, death is going to happen to you, but people don't think that they might also get incapacitated, and then they won't be able to handle their affairs and nobody else can handle their affairs because they don't know anything is or how to access it. So you know, it really is a question of preparedness. So I really like your mom a lot for that. That's a great virtue. She'd make a terrific professional organiser, I'm sure. Yeah. And you know, it's there's a lot of little things in our life that we don't want to talk about, we don't want to think about having to pass things on, you know, to other people, we sort of want to play that out to the very end, we do this with our, with our tangible possessions. But there's also all of this virtual possessions that you have, for instance, I'm the I'm my family's genealogist. Right. So I have a lot of that's not commercially valuable, but a lot of important information for my family. That's in ancestry.com, for instance, and I'd love to pass that on. I don't want to think about it now. But I'd like one of my nieces to pick it up and take it take it over. But they're not going to be able to do that unless I I tell them that even the account exists and what's in there and how to get into it. Right. So it isn't just about death and dying. It's really about also about legacy. You know what you want to leave to other people as well, in my opinion. Hmm.

Ingrid  9:09  
Interesting, because of course we decluttering and organising. We're so focused on stuff. Yeah. And I think that's why this topic interests me so much, because there's so much more than stuff that needs to be sorted. Yeah, absolutely. There is. So

Judith  9:25  
just to extend the example of the family genealogist, so my mother's father was murdered by the mafia, when she was seven years old, right. And so nobody's ever seen a picture of this man or the account of his his murder or anything. Now I have all that stuff now because of the internet. Yeah. And I'd love to pass that story on and the history of the family on that's not the only history of the family. You know, and so I'm very, very glad that I have a digital estate plan in place that captures that and all of my financial accounts. And you know, it sounds very scary to put it all in one place. But that's also the function of a digital estate plan to get all this passwords and access information and login information. In one place, I work with clients, they, they have this stuff, they have it all over the place, they got it on post it notes, you know, they've got it on a document with their will they've got it online, they've got a special cloud place that they have it, but this brings it all together in one spot.

Ingrid  10:31  
So does the digital estate plan then replace a will? Or can you include your digital stapling in a wheel? Or is it kind of two different things together? So how does that work? How does it fit in?

Judith  10:45  
Now it doesn't replace a wheel, I think of it as a complement to a will. Right? So you know, you use your will to designate an executor, your use, you will to identify your beneficiaries who use your will to say who's gonna get what, right of your tangible assets. So you can use your digital estate plan to say, who's gonna get what, of your, you know, your digital assets? You know, do you want to do you want your eBay account to be carried on? Who's going to do that? Who are you going to leave? I have, for instance, I have royalties from my books that you mentioned before, and they come into a special account. Well, if nobody knows about that account, then what's gonna happen to those royalties. So it's a place to kind of, you can even use it to leave notes for your executor on your digital estate plan, like a lot of these social media accounts have mechanisms now, where if you pass, you can have an authorised representative say, oh, you know, put a memorial page up on Facebook for three months for this individual? Or no, no, no, my wishes, my last my final wishes, or for you to take it down? I want to completely taken down, right. Or it should be nice. If the family got together and made a memorial video of my life, I put it up there on you know, Instagram or Pinterest or whatever. So you can have your wishes, like you do in a will designated on a digital estate plan.

Ingrid  12:21  
Okay, and do you also then advise to have a separate digital estate plan executor

Judith  12:28  
or something? Well, it's called the Digital executor, actually. And it could be the same person as your regular executor. But there's some qualities a digital executor has that may be your executor executive might not have. So like they must be internet savvy. Now my brother who I adore is my executor. But he's very old school. He's not going to know how to take down a Facebook page or a website, or put up a memorial page where all this technical kind of internet stuff. So you know, I think they should work together the executor and the digital executor. And you can designate your digital executor in your will, but it's not a legal entity, like an executor is the digital executor has no rights under any law at all, for any property or the disposition of any property tangible or digital. So that big difference. Okay.

Ingrid  13:26  
All right. Interesting. So, okay, you've kind of we've kind of gone through a couple of the things like what do you include in a digital estate plan? But can we dive a little bit more into that? Because I'm not thinking my brain is like working over and I'm thinking, oh, yeah, I've got social media accounts. And I've gotten a random Pinterest thing that I opened once and I'm thinking about bank statements. And so is there some sort of

Judith  13:55  
some clues as to what to how you know what should go on the digital estate plan. So if you have any invisible automated transactions flying around, that's a good clue to things to put on your digital estate plan, because that's the that's the that's what you want to make visible? Yeah, is all of that stuff. So the word automated, should give you a clue. And then anything for which you've developed a profile, you know, how you go into a site, and your purchasing side or any kind of website and you develop a profile, anything that you've developed a profile on, is subject to cyber criminality. So you want to record it on your digital estate plan. So those are two ways to know what goes on there. Other stuff you can put on there. I mean, you know, people now have a password password protected cars, they have keyless car pads where they tie the code, who's gonna get into your car? How someone's gonna get into your car, you might put that on your digital estate plan, the pin number that unlocks your your phone, your cell phone, or your laptop, for that matter, all of those kinds of codes can go. And we're going to talk a bit about security because I know your, your listeners are already getting the heebie jeebies. Yeah, she must nuts. This woman, it's got all my account numbers on there now. And all my login information and all my password, you know, it could ruin my life if this falls into the wrong hands. And so we're going to talk, I suppose. Yeah, talk a bit about that. Yeah, for sure that answer your question. Now, are there other things specifically, you want to know about what goes on there?

Ingrid  15:36  
Well, I'm just thinking I was, I just heard you talking, I was like, this is going to be a very long list. Because we have so many accounts these days, every week.

Judith  15:47  
Yeah, you know, some accounts just sort of wither on the vine, you've never used them, and they're not very active and all that. And so you don't want to get too crazy about it. But I have a client, the longest I've ever seen with clients is three pages long. Okay. You know, but you know, you might want to think about things like, Do you have photographs on Shutterfly, maybe your family wants access to those photographs, you know, maybe you have music on Spotify, your own music, music that you've created, or videos or things like that, or even who's gonna get the blogs, off of your website, maybe you have some great blogs that you want to keep, you know, you don't want to lose. So this, this is all ways to use a digital estate plan.

Ingrid  16:34  
And is it helpful to especially if you run your own business like we do, to kind of make maybe a digital estate plan for personal and then it may be a separate one for kind of more work and business and things like that. So you've kind of can almost like categorise with in your head.

Judith  16:53  
I, you know, I think the whole a point about the digital estate plan that the whole point is the centralization of all of this information. So I advocate for anything that's automated in or, you know, we make a profile of some of the criteria we've discussed, whether it's personal, or financial, to go on a digital estate plan. Now, there are small business owners who prefer in fact, to have a separate one, you know, instead of their personal one, these are up to you. I only work with clients to develop the personal ones. I don't do the small business ones. Because that gets into a lot of issues around technology and redundancy and protecting it. And I'm just like, that's not my thing.

Ingrid  17:45  
Yeah. Yeah. Got it. Got it. So, yes, let's talk about safety, then, because I can feel our listeners who are like, either driving or walking around in a supermarket or maybe running across Oh, god, Oh, my word. All this information in one plays this, this is very scary.

Judith  18:03  
I know. I know. And in fact, we're taught just the opposite. You know, don't write your password down anywhere. Don't share them with anybody don't make anything accessible, you know, blah, blah, blah. Well, I think we've, again, I am not the kind of person who wants to go backwards to pen and paper or anything like that. But I do think you should build a digital estate plan, a hard copy on your hard drive on your computer. And then you password protect that document with a really strong password. And a really strong passwords has at least 15 characters made up of letters, numbers and symbols. And the truth is that Have you ever heard Ingrid of anybody who's had a Word document or an Excel document broken into? You know, in your? No, it's very safe. So your password that you build this document, whether it's a Word document or an Excel document, you can use the proprietary form that I have in my booklet. If you Google digital estate plan, you'll get plenty of different formats to use. Just choose one and fill in all the fields. Password protect it. And now the thing is that you after you build it on your hard drive, you save it to one of these things that you know that we have different names for. It doesn't stay on your harddrive. It goes to a thumb drive. Some people call it a flash drive. Some people call it a jump drive. There's different names for that an external storage item device like those V stick. Yeah, and it's the only thing that's on that device that document your digital statement. Plus the password to get into it are on that little tiny thing. And that's what you hand to your exec either, right, or your power of attorney this gizmo right here, you also print out a copy a hard copy. So in case this thing fails, the flash drive fails, you have a hard copy of it. And that's what you put with your will, and your power of attorney and all your final documents. So a hardcopy version of it goes there, it lives instead on an external device, which is handed to your authorised representative. And it's nowhere else, it isn't anywhere else you can camp. Now some people, especially younger people, want their final documents, their will their power of attorney and their digital estate plan to live in the cloud, in a very safe site, encrypted heavily on the cloud. And I think that's fine, too. It's really your comfort level. Right? So and you can do both. As a matter of fact, you can do this version that I've described to you of safety, or you can do the on the in the cloud one or both. And people ask me, Well, what cloud site do you recommend for your final documents where, where they'll really be saying, and you can develop an accessible entry system with various authorised representatives? Well, every time I recommend one, it gets hacked, or something happens to the site or another site buys it or whatever. So if your listeners want a recommendation for cloud sites for their digital estate plan, and other final documents, Google digital estate plan, cloud site, and you will get the latest and you can pick out one, you know, that you feel is the most secure. So that's how I handle it with my clients. Okay,

Ingrid  21:59  
and you mentioned that there's a form that people can use. So can you can you tell me again, exactly where people can find that if they want to use your one? How is that the best way? So

Judith  22:11  
inside of my ebook, which is called Creating your digital estate plan is a link to a form. Okay, and that's the one that I've built. And it's really, it's really like Not a big deal for him. It has columns that go across, and they say, name of account, account number, you know, website address, what's the password? What's the user code? What's the security question, then it has a column for those notes that you and I talked about. So it's a very straightforward, easy thing to use. But you will also be able to find a form that friendly to us, if you just Google the words digital estate plan. And you'll get lots of options for forms. Some of them will be Word document forms, and some of them will be an Excel spreadsheet form. There's all other kinds of forms as

Ingrid  23:07  
well. So what I'll do listeners, because I have actually read Juliet's digital estate plan book, obviously, to prepare for today's spot best, but also because I'm interested in it, I will put the link to that book in the show notes. So if you're interested, and you think you know what, after listening today, I would love to know a little bit more. And then you can also find the form that Jude is talking about. And of course, like I mentioned before, Judith has written several books. So I will put her name into the Amazon, the link to Amazon to all her books in case you're interested in

Judith  23:42  
other areas, then I made it really inexpensive. And the book is very easy to read. It's just like 20 pages or something. It's very entertaining. It's informative, and and useful.

Ingrid  23:54  
So then my question is, okay, so we've gathered all this information, we've put it in a form, we've put it on an external hard drive a hard copy in the executive with the will and then something changes. So how often do you do this?

Judith  24:14  
Well, you know, everybody's different. Some people are well organised, like your mom. And every time a password changes, or she opens up a new account, she's going to update her digital estate plan. I know your mom, or those professional organisers who are listening to you on this podcast, are going to do it that way. But for normal people, I would say what you want to do is update your digital estate plan by tying it to another activity that you do regularly. Like regularly you change the oil in your car. That would be the time to update your digital statement or regularly. You change the batteries in your smoke alarm. This This is a trick that it's an old standby for a professional organise to tie a new habit to an old habit, right. So things don't change so dramatically and so quickly that you have to update your digital estate plan every month. You can update it, when there are changes if you're well organised enough. Or you can attach your changes to your digital estate plan when you when you do an another routine. That is regularised. And that's what I teach my clients to do.

Ingrid  25:31  
Right. So realistically, once per year, possibly twice per year with the changing of the clocks or something could be a reminder to do it, but once or twice per year should be plenty if you set it up properly from the start.

Judith  25:44  
Yeah, you know, I have a client who does it on her birthday. Okay, you know that that's an annual thing. I have another client who does it on his anniversary, the to the wife and the husband sit down together and they update the digital estate plan together on their anniversary. I mean, they do other things on their anniversary. But they they also do that.

Ingrid  26:05  
Okay, cool, interesting. Okay, so then I was thinking, you know, I read your book, I was preparing the puffer fish, and I went, and I was thinking to myself, this is so important. But nobody talks about this, how is this possible? Why have there not been like loads of magazines and articles? And? I mean, why is Why does nobody notice and do this?

Judith  26:30  
Well, you're gonna change that, aren't you? Going worldwide, everyone's gonna have finally, a digital estate plan. And well, it gets back a little bit to what we talked about earlier, about mortality. People don't want to do that. But I think the reason it isn't being pushed so much is that the people who need to take a stand and take leadership on promoting it are things like, you know, attorneys, estate attorneys, funeral directors, lawyers, people at the bank, who handle estates, folks like that, who are on the who interact with families, who are now dealing with death, or incapacitation. Right. And those are the people who really don't have the knowledge yet about digital estate planning. So that's, that's the group that we have to get to, that's the group that we have to market to as well as, of course, our productivity consultants and our professional organisers, we think, have a big role, a big role to play in this. But I think it's not a, you know, a direct to consumer, that path is not quite as easy. I think we need that kind of middle piece in there of advocates for this. And now, when you google digital estate plan, when I did it a decade ago, when I first formulated the idea of this, there were very few people who were promoting this, but now there are, trust me, there are now hundreds, you may not have heard of them, but there are hundreds of them. Some of them are very costly. You know, they're it's expensive to get a well done a power of attorney done. And now a digital state plan done and some people are charging ridiculous prices for it, I will tell you that mine is below $20. So and if you run into trouble and you can't do it yourself, we can get you someone to help you, you know, through a zoom call to walk you through your digital estate plan, we can get your help with that. So

Ingrid  28:42  
I think it's one of those things that we never really realised when we all started with social media and online banking and being able to do everything alone. It's I think it's just because it's grown. So slowly but surely more and more and more. Yeah, we're still all kind of playing catch up a little bit, aren't we that we like? Oh, yeah. See? It's Yes, of course.

Judith  29:06  
really taken off, hasn't it? Our our digital life our information afterlife is huge. Absolutely huge. Like he was saying oh my god, this thing's gonna be like pages and pages of what you have to be a little discerning about, you know, this silly stuff you don't really need on that just stuff that you know is really kind of important. But you're right. It's really grown a lot. Our information afterlife hasn't yet.

Ingrid  29:32  
Yeah, yeah, for sure. Any final thoughts Judith from you? Know,

Judith  29:38  
I think it's really I totally support everybody having a digital estate plan. I just want to advocate again that it's an easy thing to do. It's nothing to be afraid of. You can build one you can have one you can secure one you can and you'll feel so much peace of mind. Knowing that this document exists just like a will, so much peace of mind, you really can't put you can't put, you know, a price tag on that.

Ingrid  30:09  
Yeah, yeah, I fully support that. So listeners, that is it for this episode Judah. Thank you for being a guest on our show.

Judith  30:18  
You're welcome. It was my pleasure.

Ingrid  30:21  
Oh, well, listeners, are you inspired to take action? Because that's what we're all about here at the declutter hub. Are you going to look into a digital estate plan? Or are you going to put on your diary on your to do list to actually create one and like you said, it's nothing to be afraid of. It doesn't have to be all done tomorrow. But put it on your radar for you to do that. So we really hope you've enjoyed listening and that you feel inspired to do this. So if you've enjoyed this podcast, please share it with others may be thinking to yourself, oh, wow, my friend needs to know that Oh, my family member needs to know this too. And we'll we'll put all the information from Judith in the show notes so you can find it. And of course, if you want to share this podcast, use our sharing buttons. Now.

Judith  31:10  
Put some contact information for me. Yeah, well, definitely. Yeah. No.

Ingrid  31:16  
Yeah. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah, no, we'll do that as well. Definitely. Yeah, we'll definitely add that in the show notes too. I will put your website in June so people can find you if they've got more questions or need any help. Definitely do that. Two things. If you want to have more handy tips and advice from Lesley now you can find this in lots of places. We have a fantastic supportive Facebook group called the declutter hub community, which is a great starting point. If you don't want to miss miss her next podcast. Don't forget to subscribe to this YouTube declutter our podcast and it will pop into your notifications each Friday. So thank you so much for listening, and we'll see you next time.

Outro  31:59  
Thanks for listening to this week's episode of the Declutter Hub podcast. Check out declutterhub.com for more inspiration. Don't forget to tune in next week.
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