Investment Instructions for Your Sibling: An Adelaide Carer’s Plan for Mum or Dad’s Shares, ETFs and Crypto

You’re the one who drives to the appointments, sits in on the GP visits, and reads the letters from the super fund. Your sibling lives interstate or just lives a different life — but if your parent loses capacity tomorrow, or dies, your sibling is the other person who needs to know what’s there. Between your parent’s CommSec account, a long-dormant Computershare holding from a Telstra float, an ETF parcel with a newer broker, and the small Bitcoin position your dad bought in 2021 and never quite explained — the plan is to leave your sibling a clear list, not a treasure hunt.

The problem

Investments held by older Australians are routinely fragmented across decades. A direct shareholding from a 1990s privatisation sits at one share registry under an SRN. An ETF parcel sits with a CHESS-sponsored broker under a HIN. A managed fund sits with the issuer. And — increasingly — a small crypto position sits on an exchange or a hardware wallet that nobody else in the family has ever touched.

ASIC’s MoneySmart guidance on crypto-assets is blunt: crypto has limited consumer protections, and if keys or access are lost, the holding is effectively lost. ASIC’s estate planning guidance reminds families that the executor must identify and gather assets before distributing them — and the executor cannot claim what they cannot prove existed. For an Adelaide family where one sibling is doing the day-to-day caring and the other lives in Melbourne or Perth, the risk isn’t malice. It’s that the caring sibling holds all the context in their head, and if something happens to them too, none of it survives.

What the Digital Legacy Vault does

The Digital Legacy Vault is an asset-instruction register: you record what your parent owns, where the records sit, and who you’ve named to receive the instructions. The simplified version records, per investment: the issuer or exchange name, the broker, the HIN or SRN or exchange account identifier, the type of holding (direct shares, ETF, managed fund, crypto), and notes about where paper records or hardware wallets are physically stored.

The Digital Legacy Vault holds instructions about what exists and how your sibling can find it — not your parent’s passwords, not exchange logins, not recovery phrases, and not hardware wallet PINs. For the crypto position specifically: the vault records that the position exists and roughly where (which exchange, or “Ledger device in the safe deposit box at the Rundle Mall branch”) — but the keys themselves remain wherever your parent has chosen to store them.

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 and outside AUSTRAC’s AML/CTF reporting obligations — and it’s why it can be a simple subscription rather than a regulated product.

How it works

  1. You sit down with your parent (or on their behalf, if they’ve already given you authority) and add each holding to the vault: broker, issuer, HIN/SRN/account identifier, asset type.
  2. For crypto, you record the exchange name and account email, or the make and physical location of the hardware wallet — not the seed phrase, not the PIN.
  3. You name your sibling as the recipient for the investments module, and they accept (the vault records their consent under the Privacy Act framework that governs personal information about third parties).
  4. You set the release rules — for example, release on confirmed loss of capacity, or release on death with a death certificate uploaded.
  5. When the rule fires, your sibling sees only the investments module — broker contacts, HINs, the list of what exists. They contact each broker and registry directly. The vault accelerates the finding step; the brokers and registries run their own deceased estate processes.

Why this matters in Adelaide

Adelaide families are often geographically split — one adult child stayed, one or two moved east. The carer sibling accumulates years of undocumented context: which drawer the Computershare statements live in, which broker the SMSF trades through, whether the crypto sits on an exchange or a device. If that context isn’t written down, an interstate sibling acting as co-executor faces months of letters to share registries trying to confirm whether a holding still exists. For the crypto piece, ASIC’s guidance is clear that lost keys mean lost holdings — but a clear instruction that the position existed still saves the estate from paying a forensic searcher to look for something the family can already confirm is gone.

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 sibling can find it — not your parent’s passwords, not their exchange logins, not their seed phrases, and not their hardware wallet PINs.