American Airlines terms effective March 1, 2026 say miles are not property of the member or of their estate. Its request window runs one year.
Most of a digital estate carries no deadline at all, so your family can take a month or two without losing much. Loyalty balances are different. Hilton and IHG use one-year windows as well, Delta’s terms provide for forfeiture, and Marriott permits one transfer. Domain names lapse on non-payment whether or not probate has finished, and no vendor monitors death records.
Cryptocurrency divides into two situations that behave nothing alike, and which one an account falls into decides what a family recovers. Money an account earned is a third case. Each one carries its own clock, its own paperwork, and its own answer to who ends up holding the value.
One ordering rule covers the whole page. Saving the photos and files comes before cancelling a plan, closing an account, or letting a renewal lapse.
An executor who cancels a hosting plan to stop the bleeding can take a live website down with it. The order is cheap to get right. Copying first costs one more month of whatever the plan charges, and it protects material that no later payment rebuilds. Nothing else on this page gets worse because you spent a week on the copying.
None of what follows says what an estate is owed, because that turns on the will, the state, and each contract. The lawyer handling the estate decides that. What this page reports is what the companies themselves have published, and the date on which each claim was read.
Airline miles and hotel points run on a one-year clock
A loyalty balance is a contract term. American Airlines describes a one-time crediting of miles at its own discretion, on documentation, and requested within one year.
Discretion is the load-bearing word, because a program that credits a balance as a courtesy can also decline to. The written terms are the floor. Hilton and IHG publish one-year windows of their own, and Delta’s terms provide for forfeiture of the balance. Marriott permits a transfer of a balance, though the terms allow only a single recipient.
Travel-industry reporting describes front-line staff as more generous in practice than the written terms require. The contract still sets the baseline. A family that plans around the friendlier version and misses the window has no written term left to point at.
Every one of these requests needs paper. Letters testamentary and certified death certificates start nearly every platform process, and the paperwork page covers both.
Whether an estate should chase a loyalty balance at all is a separate question from whether it can. Some balances are worth little. The lawyer handling the estate can say which of these is worth a phone call and which is not. Program terms also change, and July 28, 2026 is the date this site last read the ones named here.
A balance the terms call not property doesn’t pass the way a bank balance passes. The request is a courtesy, not a claim. Anyone weighing whether to make it should note that the window runs one year, and a calendar entry beats memory.
Domain names lapse whether or not probate has finished
A registrar bills a domain on its own schedule. The registration ends when the payment stops, and an open probate file has no bearing at all on that date.
Renewal dates therefore belong in the triage list, right beside the certified death certificates and the letters testamentary. Bank statements are where they surface. The Probate Handbook checklist hosted by the Fairfax County Commissioner of Accounts tells executors to gather three years of statements. Postal mail forwarding, which needs in-person proof of executor authority, catches renewal notices that statements miss.
GoDaddy documents a process. It asks for four items sent together, and a partial package stalls. No other registrar was checked for this site, so treat the rest as unknown rather than as the same.
A change of registrant starts a second clock. ICANN, which sets the rules registrars follow, imposes a 60-day transfer lock, so a second move waits two months.
A hosting plan and a domain are separate bills, and stopping one of them doesn’t end the other. Each can carry a live site. An executor who cancels both in the same afternoon can lose the pages and the address together. Copy the site down before either bill stops, and the whole delay costs a few days.
Whether a name belongs to the estate or to a business the estate owns changes who signs the registrar’s forms. The lawyer holding the file answers that. A renewal falling inside the transfer lock still comes due, and whether the estate pays it is the executor’s call with counsel.
Crypto at a company, and crypto held alone
Coinbase freezes an account when it learns of a death. The company’s materials describe no beneficiary designation on consumer accounts, so every request there runs through probate papers.
The executor files the request from their own Coinbase account rather than from the account of the person who died. A certified death certificate, probate documents, and a photo ID go with the filing. The balance then moves into a new account the executor opens, so the original account never changes hands. Reports describe weeks even in smooth cases.
Coinbase’s own page blocked automated checking on July 28, 2026, so this description rests on restatements rather than on the source. Five or more restatements agree. This site marks that as verified at one remove, and planning for crypto is the other half.
Self-custody sits at the other end. No exchange, issuer, or court can restore access to a wallet whose private key is gone, and the coins stay unspendable.
A seed phrase is the list of 12 to 24 words that regenerates a wallet’s private keys. Holding the phrase is holding the money. No reset exists, no support desk can recover it, and no death certificate stands in for the words. Estimates of how much has been lost that way are vendor figures rather than peer-reviewed measurements.
Chainalysis figures relayed in early 2025 put lost bitcoin at 2.3 million to 3.7 million coins, or roughly 11% to 18% of maximum supply. The often-quoted 20% traces to 2017. Chainalysis and River attribute 1.5 million to 2 million coins to forgotten keys.
One estate-planning firm reports, without verification, an estate that could not recover roughly $400,000 for want of a seed phrase. Take that as an anecdote.
Holdings big enough to matter are a standing reason to bring in a lawyer who works on them. This page isn’t that lawyer. Payment apps are a different gap, because PayPal, Venmo, and Cash App weren’t checked for this site. Ask those companies directly rather than reading this page across to them.
What happens to an account that earned money
Accounts that made money split four ways at death, and the split decides what an executor should ask for. Sorting them first saves wasted letters. Some assets move, and a domain name can pass to a beneficiary through a registrar’s estate process. Unpaid AdSense earnings belong to the estate.
The money is claimable through Google’s process for a person who has died, though the account itself is not. Money can move while the account stays. A third pattern moves the publication only while its owner is alive, and Substack is the documented case.
Substack’s terms bar assignment of an account. They carry no provision for death, though the company does run a transfer of ownership between living people.
The documented path after a death is removal rather than a handover to anybody in the family. A fourth pattern ends the value. Patreon accounts can’t be sold or transferred, and the revenue stops when the account stops. Etsy accounts are non-transferable in every documented case, and its policy on deceased members offers no access.
That policy does offer closure and a possible limited release of content. The shop isn’t the whole business. The underlying trade, its inventory, and its brand can still pass through the estate to a beneficiary who opens a new shop.
Put the renewal dates and the one-year loyalty windows on a single calendar before the rest of the estate work starts. The lawyer holding the file can rank them.