Digital Legacy Instructions for Your Executor: An Adelaide Carer’s Plan for a Parent’s Photos, Journals, and Online Life

You’re helping an aging parent in Adelaide get their affairs in order. The will is drafted, the enduring power of attorney is signed, the advance care directive is lodged with the GP. What’s left is the part nobody warned you about: forty years of family photos on a phone with a PIN your parent can’t always remember, a Gmail account that holds the only copy of half the grandchildren’s birthday videos, a Facebook history that’s effectively a journal, and a laptop with scanned letters from the 1970s. When your parent goes, the executor named in the will needs to know that any of this exists — and what your parent wanted done with it.

The problem

ASIC’s MoneySmart guidance on wills and estate planning is clear that a will directs the executor in administering the estate — but wills rarely list digital assets in any useful detail, and almost never name a recovery contact for a cloud account. The practical result, repeated across Australian families every week, is the same: the phone is locked, the cloud account requires identity documents the executor doesn’t have, and the photos quietly disappear when the subscription lapses.

Your parent’s executor is not their tech support. The executor’s job is to administer the estate — locate assets, pay debts, distribute what’s left under the will. If the executor doesn’t know that your mother kept a journal in a Google Doc, or that your father’s only copy of his service photos is in iCloud, those things don’t get preserved. They get lost. And the Privacy Act framework that governs how providers handle personal information means platforms can’t just hand over an account on a phone call — the executor needs documentation, identifiers, and ideally a recovery contact your parent nominated while they still could.

What the Asset Instruction Vault does

The Digital Legacy Vault is an asset-instruction register. For the digital legacy module, the vault records, per item or account: where the material lives (which device, which cloud service, which platform), the account identifier or email associated with it, the recovery contact your parent nominated with the provider (Apple Legacy Contact, Google Inactive Account Manager, Facebook Legacy Contact), and your parent’s stated intention — archive to a named family member, delete, publish, or hand to the executor to decide.

The Digital Legacy Vault holds instructions about what exists and how your executor can find it — not the phone PIN, not the iCloud password, not the Google recovery codes. Credentials stay with your parent. The instruction layer is what the executor receives.

That boundary is deliberate. The Digital Legacy Vault is not a financial product, not a custody service, and not an advice service — it is an instructions register. That is what keeps it outside the AFSL regime under Corporations Act Part 7.6, outside AUSTRAC reporting obligations, and able to operate as a simple subscription rather than a regulated product.

How it works

  1. You sit down with your parent and list each digital location that matters — the phone, the iPad, the laptop, each email account, each social account, the external hard drive in the desk drawer. The vault records what’s there, not how to get in.
  2. For each cloud account, your parent nominates a recovery contact directly with the provider (Apple, Google, Meta) while they still have capacity. The vault records that this has been done and the date.
  3. Your parent records intention per category — family photos archive to a named relative, the Facebook account becomes a memorial page, the work email is closed.
  4. The executor is named as the recipient for the digital legacy module and accepts (the vault records their consent under the Privacy Act framework that governs personal information about third parties).
  5. On release — triggered by your parent’s death and verified per the release rules — the executor sees the digital legacy module only. They get a structured inventory and a sequence of provider contact points, not a pile of passwords.

Why this matters in Adelaide

Adelaide skews older than the national average, and a significant share of carer-of-parent arrangements here involve adult children who live interstate — Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane — handling things by phone with a parent still in the family home in the eastern or northern suburbs. When the executor is also interstate, every hour spent guessing which cloud service holds the photos is an hour the local family is waiting. A clear instruction set prepared while your parent still has capacity — what exists, where it lives, what they wanted — turns the digital part of the estate from a multi-week recovery exercise into a checklist the executor can work through methodically.

Sources

Join the waitlist

Join the waitlist — first access when the Digital Legacy Vault opens for Adelaide carers

We’re opening waitlist access in tranches. Sign up to be notified when carers organising an aging parent’s affairs in Adelaide can register their first digital legacy module. The Digital Legacy Vault holds instructions about what exists and how your executor can find it — not your parent’s phone PIN, not their cloud passwords, and not the accounts themselves.