Investment Instructions for Your Parent’s Executor: An Adelaide Carer’s Plan for Shares, ETFs and Crypto

You’re the adult child helping your mother or father get their affairs in order in Adelaide. They’ve got a CommSec account from the nineties, a couple of ETFs through a newer broker, a term deposit at a regional bank, and — you only found this out last Christmas — about four thousand dollars of Bitcoin bought on an exchange in 2021. Their executor (your sibling, the family solicitor, you) needs to know all of that exists. None of it should travel as passwords.

The problem

Australian estates routinely lose track of investments because there is no central registry the executor can search. A direct shareholding sits behind a HIN or SRN that the executor has to discover. A managed fund sits with a registry the executor has to identify. Crypto holdings are worse: ASIC’s MoneySmart guidance on crypto-assets is explicit that they sit outside the consumer protections that apply to regulated financial products, and that lost access generally means lost coin. ASIC’s MoneySmart estate-planning guidance is equally direct that assets the executor cannot locate cannot be administered.

For an aging parent, the risk compounds. Capacity can decline before paperwork gets done. The executor inherits a job — administering the estate — but no map. They open one bank statement, find a dividend payment from an issuer they’ve never heard of, and start a months-long hunt through share registries. Meanwhile the crypto sits on an exchange that may freeze the account pending probate, or on a hardware wallet in a drawer that no one knows is a hardware wallet.

What the Asset Instruction Vault does

The Digital Legacy Vault is an asset-instruction register: your parent (with your help) records what they own, where to find it, and who you’ve nominated to receive the instructions. The simplified version records, per investment: the issuer or fund name, the broker or exchange, the HIN/SRN or account identifier, the registry contact, and notes about where paper records are kept. The vault holds instructions about what exists and how your parent’s executor can find it — not your parent’s keys, recovery phrases, hardware wallet PINs, exchange passwords, or two-factor devices.

That boundary is deliberate. The Digital Legacy Vault is not a financial product, not a custody service, and not a financial-advice service. It’s an instructions register. That keeps it outside the AFSL regime under Corporations Act Part 7.6, outside AUSTRAC’s AML/CTF reporting obligations, and — practically — simple enough that an 82-year-old and their carer can actually use it.

How it works

  1. You sit down with your parent and add each holding to the vault — issuer, broker or exchange, HIN/SRN or member number, registry phone number, and a note like “hardware wallet, top drawer of the filing cabinet, blue Ledger device.”
  2. You name the executor (per the will) as the recipient for the investments module and they accept; the vault records their consent.
  3. You set release rules — typically on death, evidenced by a death certificate, sometimes also on loss of capacity if your parent has authorised that.
  4. When the trigger occurs, the executor is notified and sees only the investments instructions module — not other modules unless your parent released them too.
  5. The executor contacts each broker, registry, or exchange directly using the identifiers in the vault, alongside grant of probate. For crypto specifically, the executor can verify what existed, rule out a wasted forensic search, and document the holding for the estate accounts even if the keys are unrecoverable.

Why this matters in Adelaide

Adelaide families tend to hold the long-tail of Australian investment history — Telstra T1 and T2 shareholdings, demutualised insurer stock from the late nineties, BankSA term deposits, ETFs opened during the COVID-era retail boom, and a smaller but real layer of crypto bought on Australian exchanges. Probate in South Australia is handled through the Supreme Court Probate Registry, and the executor’s job is to inventory the estate before distribution. A clean instructions module — what exists, where, and who to call — turns weeks of registry detective work into a checklist, and prevents the most common failure mode: the holding nobody knew about, quietly forgotten.

Sources

Join the waitlist

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

We’re opening waitlist access in tranches. Sign up to be notified when carers in Adelaide can register a first investments module on behalf of an aging parent. The Digital Legacy Vault holds instructions about what exists and how your parent’s executor can find it — not your parent’s keys, recovery phrases, or hardware wallet PINs.