Pub. 4 2014 Issue 1

18 AUTOMOBILE DEALER NEWS ILLINOIS www.illinoisdealers.com E very dealer knows it’s a good idea to have a will; in this modern digital age, though, it has also become increasingly necessary to have a plan for handling digital estates after someone has died. That’s why estate planning has expanded in ways no one could have foreseen even a few years ago. The broad categories include: » » Soc ia l med ia websites such a s Facebook and Twitter » » Online accounts and passwords for both personal and business accounts » » Online photos and videos » » Blogs There are times when dealers can man- age without a team of people to help them. This isn’t one of them. After all, the issues involved in handling a digital legacy are at the forefront of many of the changes going on today. Getting a digital legacy in order should be part of the succession plan for dealers and they should not try to navigate these waters on their own. The world has altered a great deal even when you compare it to how things were as recently as 20 years ago. Dealers are just like the people in every other business. They need to adapt to the future and fill developing needs. The next few years are bound to continue changing many things we take for granted. Planning is particularly important because it isn’t like there is a one-size-fits- all solution. Every dealership has its own concerns about privacy and its own rules for handling information. Since the whole idea is to delegate important decisions to trusted individuals, enabling them to tie up loose ends, that means someone needs to have Power of Attorney for managing assets. In some cases, though, it may also be necessary to appoint a Digital Executor whose duties are tied specifi- cally to deleting or distributing online assets; for example, a dealer may have a trusted individual who is in charge of almost every aspect of an estate but who just doesn’t know enough about digital estates to know what to do. A dealer will ideally select someone who has the chops to handle both traditional estate planning and a digital estate. A Little Background Everyone knows that the Internet has changed everything having to do with in- formation. As always, however, laws are slow to catch up. These matters are gener- ally decided on the basis of individual com- pany policies, and not by a set of state-level or federal-level guidelines. What the U.S. needs, but does not yet have, is a unified approach for handling digital information after the death of its rightful owner. As of February 2012, only a handful of states had laws to govern digital asset management: Connecticut, Idaho, Indiana, Oklahoma, and Rhode Island. That doesn’t mean the laws are current. The 2005 Digital Assets Law in Connecticut, for example, is now eight years old. In a world where you get new Apple products every four to six months What to Expect, How to Prepare A Digital Legacy: