A reader commented on our article about the importance of e-estate planning (click here to read that article) with this question.
“Can we have it set up with our lawyer to just have the hard drive destroyed?”
You’d have to check with your attorney to see if that’s a service offered by the office. Or you could also assign that task to the executor of your estate if that’s a different person than your attorney.
Keep in mind that wiping your hard drive does not close your accounts. Any bank accounts, social media accounts, email accounts, or even utility accounts will remain active until they are actually closed or switched to a memorial account by someone. You’ll still need to provide someone with usernames and passwords to take care of it. There’s no reason an attorney couldn’t be your legacy contact for Facebook.
Closing down the accounts is the only way to lessen the chance of identity theft.