Online Account Instructions for Your Parent’s Executor: An Adelaide Carer’s Inventory Before Capacity Slips

You’re the adult child helping your mum or dad in Adelaide get their affairs in order while they still can. The will is sorted, the executor is named (probably you, probably a sibling, possibly the solicitor on King William Street), and the medical paperwork is in the top drawer. What no one has written down is the list of email addresses, the iCloud account that holds forty years of family photos, the Facebook account that’s still active, the password manager that holds everything else, and the loyalty programs with a few hundred dollars of value sitting in them. The plan is to leave the executor a clean inventory — provider, username, recovery contact, what to do with each account — without ever handing over a single password.

The problem

When an older Australian dies or loses capacity, their online accounts often become unreachable. Provider deceased-user processes vary widely: some require a death certificate and a court grant, some have an inactive-account manager that only works if it was set up in advance, and some give you nothing at all. The executor’s legal job, as ASIC MoneySmart’s wills and estate planning guidance describes, is to gather and administer the estate’s assets — but you cannot administer an account you do not know exists.

The losses are quiet and permanent. Photo libraries locked behind a forgotten Apple ID. An email account that holds twenty years of correspondence with the family solicitor. A small superannuation rollover notification sitting unread in a Gmail account no one can sign into. The executor needs a list, not a password — and the list has to exist before capacity slips, not after.

What the Digital Legacy Vault does

The Digital Legacy Vault is an asset-instruction register. For each online account your parent holds, the simplified version (built for individuals and families) records: the provider (Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, the password manager), the username or email identifier, whether a recovery contact or legacy contact has been set up at the provider, and your parent’s preference for each account — memorialise, close, preserve photos, transfer loyalty points to the estate. The vault does NOT store passwords, recovery codes, 2FA seeds, or security question answers. It stores the map, not the keys.

The boundary matters. The Digital Legacy Vault is not a financial product, not a custody service, and not a financial advice service. It is an instructions register — what exists, where to find it, who to tell. That keeps it outside the AFSL regime under Corporations Act Part 7.6, outside AUSTRAC reporting obligations, and outside the credential-storage risks that a password vault carries. Personal information inside the vault is handled under the Australian Privacy Principles as set out in the Privacy Act 1988.

How it works

  1. You sit with your parent (in person, or over a video call) and enumerate their online accounts — email, cloud storage, social, photo, password manager, loyalty, gaming. You add each to the vault as a row: provider, username, recovery contact status, closure preference.
  2. Where the provider offers a legacy or inactive-account mechanism (Apple Legacy Contact, Google Inactive Account Manager, Facebook memorialisation), you set it up with your parent and record in the vault that it is done.
  3. Your parent names their executor as the recipient for the online accounts module. The executor accepts and the vault records their consent.
  4. Release rules are set — typically on production of a death certificate, or on a documented loss-of-capacity trigger if your parent wants the executor to act under power of attorney.
  5. When the time comes, the executor sees only the online accounts module: the inventory, the recovery contacts, and your parent’s stated wishes. They contact each provider directly through the provider’s own deceased-user process.

Why this matters in Adelaide

Adelaide families tend to be geographically settled — children stay, parents age in the same suburb for decades, and digital accounts accumulate across that long arc. The executor is often a son or daughter living ten minutes away who already helps with the iPad, but who has never seen the full list. South Australian probate is administered through the Supreme Court at Sir Samuel Way, and the practical bottleneck for executors is rarely the grant itself — it is the weeks spent guessing which email address the bank statements go to. A prepared inventory removes that guesswork.

Sources

Join the waitlist

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

We are opening waitlist access in tranches. Sign up to be notified when carers in Adelaide can register their parent’s first online accounts module. The Digital Legacy Vault holds instructions about what exists and how the executor can find it — not passwords, not recovery codes, and not the accounts themselves.