Hey friend,
I've been thinking about something that honestly keeps me up at night, and I need to share it with you. Our parents' generation has houses with deeds stored at the bank, stock portfolios managed by Fidelity, and photo albums sitting in basement boxes. Meanwhile, we have 47 different subscription services, 80,000 photos floating in the cloud, and cryptocurrency hidden in apps our parents literally can't pronounce.
Guess which generation actually needs digital estate planning more? (Spoiler: it's us, and it's not even close.)
The Great Generational Digital Divide
What Our Parents Own:
- • A house (deed at the bank)
- • A car (title in filing drawer)
- • Retirement accounts (managed by Fidelity)
- • Photo albums (physical basement boxes)
- • A will (filed at lawyer's office)
What We Actually Own:
- • Apartment lease (buried in Gmail)
- • Uber account (who can afford cars?)
- • Investments across 20+ apps
- • Photos scattered everywhere online
- • A will (maybe a 2019 Google Doc draft)
One generation built wealth that's physical and centralized. We built lives that are digital and scattered across the entire internet.
The Numbers That Are Shocking
What the average millennial owns digitally:
- • Over 150 different online accounts
- • 7 active streaming subscriptions (minimum)
- • 12 different financial and investment apps
- • 80,000 digital photos and videos
- • 500GB+ cloud storage across multiple services
- • 15 active social media profiles
- • 3-5 cryptocurrency wallets (often forgotten)
- • Around $8,000 in purely digital assets
Compare this to our parents: about 20 online accounts total, maybe 2 streaming subscriptions, 1 financial portal, around 2,000 digital photos, email and Facebook, and possibly a PayPal account. The difference is absolutely staggering.
Your Hidden Digital Fortune
Your Monthly Subscription Empire (averaging $500/month): Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, HBO Max for entertainment. Spotify, Apple Music for your soundtrack. Adobe Creative Suite for your side hustle. Microsoft 365, cloud storage, DoorDash+, Amazon Prime, gym apps, meditation apps, dating apps.
That's $6,000 per year of value that just disappears when you die.
Your Digital Goods Collection: Steam library ($2,000 average), App Store purchases ($500+), digital movies and TV shows ($1,000+), Kindle library ($300+), online courses ($1,500+). Add cryptocurrency portfolios that 34% of millennials own—Bitcoin in Coinbase, Ethereum in MetaMask, random altcoins scattered across exchanges, and staked tokens earning rewards.
The Reality Check
Here's the brutal truth: when you die without digital death planning, your family will lose access to thousands of dollars in digital assets, tens of thousands of precious memories, and years of creative work. Subscription services will keep charging your credit card forever, social media accounts will become haunting reminders with no one able to memorialize them properly.
Cryptocurrency will be lost forever—there's no "forgot password" option for blockchain wallets. Your digital art, writing, photos, and creative projects will vanish into the cloud, inaccessible to the people who would cherish them most.
What You Need to Do Right Now
Digital death planning isn't optional for our generation—it's essential. Start by auditing your digital life: list your accounts, document your assets, identify what's valuable versus what can disappear. Set up a system for your most important digital assets to be transferred to people you trust.
Most importantly, create secure final messages for your loved ones. Not password lists (those create security risks), but real messages explaining who you were, what mattered to you, and how much you loved them.
Our parents could rely on physical documents and traditional wills. We need digital death planning that actually understands our digital-first lives and protects what we've built online.