Everyday Estate Planning

I love it when computers help solve problems that they've created! When Quicken first came out, it solved the problem of how to keep track of all those new ATM receipts and still balance your checkbook. (I'm old -- this was in the dark ages BEFORE online banking, if you can believe it.)

Now, Legacy Locker comes along -- a startup designed to make it easy to pass along your digital treasures (like photos, correspondence, and videos) to your loved ones at death. For $29.99/year or $299.99/for life, you can set up your very own "digital will".

The service makes it easy to pass on your log-in credentials for such things as your email or PayPal account at your death, making it possible for your family to gain access to these digital remains of yours without a court order. It also allows you to write Legacy Letters, personal notes that will be sent to the intended beneficiary in the event of your death.

Interested? There's a free trial account available for those who want to give it a try, limited to 1 beneficiary and 3 digital assets (login info for any website, email, or other online site).

Sounds great. I just wish I could use it to keep track of my digital life BEFORE death.

It's classic: grandmother dies, and a formerly happy family dissolves into unhappiness over distributing up her personal property. The problem is that everyone wants that pie plate, special painting, or lemonade pitcher and all the will says is that her children and grandchildren should "divide up the personal property in substantially equal shares."

Deciding who gets what has a tendency to reduce even the most mature of us to four-year olds, squabbling over toys, because there's only one of each treasured thing, and it's just not possible to divide them into pieces.

Now, eDivvyUp, an online auction site, offers a new alternative to what can be a very uncomfortable situation. At eDivvyUp, a family estate manager can register the estate, catalog and photograph the available items, invite the family to participate in the auction, and then (here's the critical thing) assign each family member an equal number of points.

Want that pie plate more than anything? You can bid all 1,000 points and win it, but you won't get anything else in the auction. At the end of the auction, the estate manager's job is to distribute the property to those who won.

Online auctions are not a substitute for the kind of good family communication that may help avoid conflicts in the first place. I'm sure unhappy families would still be able to find something to squabble about (like the auction results). But they might be just the ticket for some families, who can use an online auction to divide up treasured things as fairly as possible.