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What Happens To Your iPhone After You Die?

by

The Short Answer

Your phone may contain important photos, accounts, and personal information. Planning ahead can help your loved ones understand how to access or manage digital assets when the time comes, subject to applicable laws and platform rules.

Key Takeaways

  • Digital assets are an important part of estate planning.
  • Account access and inheritance are not always the same thing.
  • Clear instructions can help your family avoid confusion.

Read Full Transcript

Hi there, Miranda Dressler here, estate planning attorney with Mackay Dressler in Petaluma, California. And today I’m going to talk a little bit about an often overlooked detail when it comes to getting your estate plan in place and making sure that kind of everything is covered. Because a lot of people will get their estate plan done, whether that’s a will-based plan, more often in our area, a trust-based plan. And they’re really fastidious about getting all of the documents in place, having it be sturdy, transferring their assets into the name of the trust, being really organized, and really making sure that they’re making it as easy on their family as possible. 

However, an often overlooked kind of detail is what happens with your phone when you die. And I’m particularly talking about here Apple phones. There’s probably gonna be similar features on an Android, but I’m not focusing on that today. I’m focusing more on the Apple phone. What happens with it? Because when it comes down to it, most of us have quite a lot of information, documents, photos, messages, et cetera, contained on our phones. And something that might be a surprise to you is that even if you have your estate plan in place, that doesn’t mean that your family is going to have access to your phone and all of that information within it when you die. In fact, if they don’t have the pin or the code to your phone, they in fact will not have access to it. It doesn’t matter if you have a trust and you’ve named a trustee. I in fact once had an actual probate proceeding going on where we still couldn’t get into the Apple phone, and I had to go file a separate petition and get like a specific extra court order just to get into this person’s iPhone and get access to their iCloud account. 

So, one of the things that you can do to make sure that your family does not run into any issues like that when you pass away is to actually add something on your iPhone called a legacy contact. And that’s basically where you choose at least one, but could be more than one, trusted person that you set up in advance that they would have access and be able to get into your iPhone and your saved information in there in the event of your death. 

So, it’s actually pretty easy to do. You go into the settings feature of your iPhone, just search, you know, type in a legacy contact and it allows you to add in that person’s name and then that person will get a text and it will send them a PIN number that they can then use when that time comes to get access to your phone. Now you do always want to make sure that this is you know, the people, the person or the people that you are adding as a legacy contact are someone that you trust, right, with that information. Another important piece to that is you don’t just want to add people, you want to tell them that you’re adding them because if someone randomly gets a text, you know, that they’ve been added, they may not fully understand exactly what that means or why you’re doing that. So just let them know, hey, I’ve added you as a legacy contact on my phone such that at my death, or even in an incapacity situation, you could access my phone if needed. 

So I hope you found that information helpful. If you have any questions about estate planning and anything in that realm, you should contact an experienced estate planning attorney in your area. Thanks.

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Miranda Dressler
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