Investment Instructions for a Trusted Friend: An Adelaide Carer’s Plan for an Aging Parent’s Shares, ETFs and Crypto

You’re helping your mother — or your father, or an aunt who raised you — get their affairs in order in Adelaide. They have a CommSec account from the nineties, an ETF holding they set up after retiring, a small parcel of Bitcoin a grandchild encouraged them to buy, and a term deposit at a regional bank. There’s no spouse, the immediate family is small or scattered, and the person they trust most outside the family is a long-standing friend who has agreed to act as a point of contact if capacity is lost. The job now is to write down what exists and where to find it — without ever writing down a password or a recovery phrase.

The problem

ASIC’s MoneySmart estate planning guidance is direct: assets that no one knows about often don’t reach the people they should. For investments held under a HIN with a broker, a CHESS-sponsored holding, an issuer-sponsored SRN, or a wallet on a crypto exchange, the executor (or the attorney under an enduring power, if capacity is lost first) cannot claim what they cannot prove existed. Crypto is the sharpest version of this problem — MoneySmart’s crypto guidance flags that lost keys mean lost coins, and that there is no central registry to query and no consumer protection scheme to fall back on.

For an aging parent in Adelaide whose nominated point of contact is a trusted friend rather than a child or spouse, the risk is compounded. The friend has goodwill but no institutional standing. They need a clear, written inventory before capacity declines — issuer, broker, account identifier — so that when they hand things over to the attorney or executor, nothing is missed and no estate funds are wasted chasing assets that may not exist.

What the Asset Instruction Vault does

The Digital Legacy Vault is an asset-instruction register. The simplified version (built for individuals and families) records, per investment line: the issuer or fund name, the broker or exchange, the HIN/SRN/member number or exchange account identifier, the approximate holding, and a note about where supporting paperwork lives. For crypto, it records that a holding exists, which exchange or wallet type holds it, and any custodial arrangement already in place.

The Digital Legacy Vault holds instructions about what exists and how your trusted friend can find it — not your parent’s keys, recovery phrases, or hardware wallet PINs. It does not hold passwords, exchange logins, two-factor codes, or seed phrases. Your parent’s nominated friend sees the inventory you have prepared, only when release rules are met.

This boundary matters: the vault is not a financial product, not a custody service, and not financial advice. It is an instructions register. That is what keeps it outside the AFSL regime under Corporations Act Part 7.6 and outside AUSTRAC’s AML/CTF reporting obligations — and what allows it to be a simple subscription rather than a regulated product.

How it works

  1. Sitting with your parent (or on their behalf, with their authority), you add each investment line — issuer, broker or exchange, account identifier, approximate holding, location of any paperwork.
  2. You name their trusted friend as the recipient for the investments module. The friend accepts and the vault records their consent — meeting the disclosure expectations of the Australian Privacy Principles, which apply because the vault holds personal information about both your parent and the named recipient.
  3. You set release rules — for example, on confirmed loss of capacity (with attorney sign-off) and on death.
  4. If a release condition is triggered, the friend is notified per those rules and sees only the investments module, not other vault modules unless those have been released too.
  5. The friend takes the inventory to the attorney or executor. For listed holdings, the broker or share registry is contacted using the HIN or SRN. For crypto, the family knows what exists so they can verify recoverable holdings against the keys held elsewhere — and rule out wasting estate funds searching for assets that aren’t there.

Why this matters in Adelaide

Adelaide households often hold longer, quieter investment histories than the national average — issuer-sponsored share parcels from privatisations and demutualisations in the 1990s, ETF holdings opened in retirement, and small crypto positions added in the last few years. When the person closest to an aging parent is a trusted friend rather than a child, the friend has no automatic standing with brokers, share registries or exchanges. A written inventory — held outside the parent’s email, outside their phone, and outside any credential — closes the gap between “we know it’s somewhere” and “we know exactly where to look.”

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 of aging parents in Adelaide can register their first investments module. The Digital Legacy Vault holds instructions about what exists and how your parent’s trusted friend can find it — not the keys, not the recovery phrases, not the hardware wallet PINs, and not the assets themselves.