What is asset protection?
Many people dream of becoming wealthy, but what they don’t realize is that once they’ve attained a significant number of assets, it’s not a trivial task to protect them.
In the financial world, asset protection means using strategies to guard your wealth from seizure or other forms of loss.
In a very practical sense, asset protection includes these basic steps:
- cataloging your assets in a secure environment
- tracking your assets
- applying technical, financial, legal or other means to protect your assets in the case of an unforeseen event.
Financial service companies can offer features such as estate planning, offshore trusts, and irrevocable trusts, but these often represent the basic minimum that asset owners need to fulfil the goal of asset protection.
A question that few of us have asked is how asset protection works, if anything is to happen to us. Will traditional asset protection techniques like wills and inheritance be so effective, in a case of an unforeseen event with us? Let’s see.
Digital Inheritance
Most of us understand inheritance as the passing of assets to beneficiaries whom the owner has appointed.
In the past, inheritance was a pretty simple process, as most people didn’t have complex assets. Even a bank account, insurance, and real-estate property were the privilege of the rich.
Nowadays, things have changed. Many people, even if not rich, have various assets such as life insurance, bank accounts, and a pension fund. People who work in startups and tech companies also have stock options or RSUs, and investment in company stocks is becoming a fashionable trend.
The problem is that many of these assets are digital and they change quite often. They are not static. Expats move from country to country and open new bank accounts; tech people move to new companies where they get RSUs and stock options in different asset vaults; people change their behavior, and one sunny day, an employee of a company decides that he will be an investor and opens an account on an online trading platform.
Because of this dynamic behavior and the digital nature of assets, old fashioned inheritance and wills just don’t solve the problem. Imagine, for example, if you had to go to an attorney to create a new will or update your existing one each time your assets or list of beneficiaries changed. This would be an expensive and time-consuming process.
How, then, can people find an easy way to secure their assets and protect their families’ inheritance?
Let’s see several ways how this can be achieved.
Secure digital vaults
Digital vaults became popular in the late 2000s. They served a very specific purpose: people could securely store in them confidential and sensitive information and access this information from anywhere. Some vaults specialized in password storage, others were more focussed on storing and organizing documents such as health records, passport scans, and insurance policies.
The primary benefit of these secure digital vaults is that they can be accessed from anywhere, as they are online. But while they are great for storing confidential digital records, they fall short in fulfilling the goal of digital inheritance. The primary requirement of a vault is to be very secure, so pivoting these systems to designate beneficiaries and provide them with access to the stored information is not a trivial task. Because of this, vaults simply can’t serve the purpose of digital inheritance tools. Their information is predominantly available to the owner of the asset.
In recent years, some vaults have tried to pivot and to provide some sort of digital inheritance features, but again, it’s not easy for systems designed not to share their information to start sharing it with people who are not the owners of the vault account – the beneficiaries.
How does DGLegacy provide digital inheritance?
DGLegacy aims to fulfil the goal of digital inheritance in several ways, which are very distinctive from how secure vaults function.
First, DGLegacy enables people to designate beneficiaries for their assets. This is not an additional feature or perk at DGLegacy – it’s part of its core design.
Second, the application has a custom-engineered Heartbeat protocol, which detects unforeseen events happening to the user. Upon detection of such an event, the information about the assets is provided to the beneficiaries to whom the assets have been assigned. This mechanism is at the core of DGLegacy, specifically designed to fulfil the goal of inheritance of assets in the digital world.
The primary difference between existing secure vaults and DGLegacy is that the latter is created with the intention of being a digital inheritance vehicle for complex assets, instead of merely a secure vault.
With the DGLegacy application, you can protect your assets against unforeseen events and ensure that your family is secure. You can connect your preferred beneficiary with your preferred assets, and they will be notified at the time you choose – while ensuring they get the support they need in the process of claiming.
With DGLegacy, you can protect all types of assets. It is also easy to keep your list of assets and beneficiaries up to date.
This way, in the event of anything unforeseen happening to you, your loved ones:
- are aware of your assets
- can identify and locate your assets
- can minimize the chance of unclaimed assets.
Then are digital vaults dead?
Absolutely not. In the modern digital world, they will play an even bigger role. But this role is not related to digital inheritance. It is rather related to secure storage of confidential information, primarily available to the owner of the vault. Their purpose is to help the busy individual organize their life, by providing easy and secure access to their digital records such as bank accounts, passwords, health records, and passports.
On the other hand, the purpose of DGLegacy is to provide a secure digital inheritance tool for asset protection, ensuring that in the case of an unforeseen event, your family will be protected. They will be aware of your assets and know where to locate them and how to claim them.
