If you're writing a will, don't forget online assets

You may not own cryptocurrency or nonfungible tokens. You may not have a big Instagram following or run an online business. But if you do almost anything online, you probably have digital assets — electronic records that you own, control or license. Failing to make arrangements for those assets while you're alive could cause unnecessary costs, stress and heartache to those you leave behind.

Online photo and video collections could be lost forever. Heirs could also be locked out of electronic records with monetary value, such as cryptocurrency and frequent flyer miles. E-mail and social media accounts could be hacked. Even basic tasks, such as paying bills online or canceling online subscriptions, may be difficult or impossible if you haven't made arrangements.

"There would be no way for someone to know how I pay bills unless they could access my online account and my e-mails," says Abby Schneiderman, co-founder of Everplans, a site for creating end-of-life plans and storing documents. "And if it takes you a while to access these accounts, you're going to realize afterwards, 'Well, we've lost thousands of dollars on services we don't use or don't need anymore because we can't access them.'"

In the past, your executor — the person entrusted with settling your estate after your death — probably could have figured out what you owned and owed by rummaging through the papers in your filing cabinet and the bills in your mail, notes Sharon Hartung, the author of two books for financial advisers, "Your Digital Undertaker" and "Digital Executor." That's no longer the case.

Google and Facebook are among the few online providers that allow you to appoint someone to manage your accounts if you become incapacitated or die. Complicating matters further, almost all providers prohibit sharing passwords, Hartung says.

So giving your executor your login credentials may be the easiest way to make sure they can carry out your wishes, estate planning experts say.

The first step in creating a plan for your digital assets is to make a list of them. Searching for a "digital assets inventory" will turn up some worksheets. Give your executor passcodes as well as passwords included in a document referenced in the will, not the will itself, which is a public record.

You may also want to leave a letter of instruction telling your executor about your wishes for various assets — what to delete, what to archive and what to transfer to heirs, for example.

Another option is to keep your login credentials in a password manager such as LastPass or 1Password. You would need to provide your executor with the master password.

Weston writes for Nerd Wallet.