Online Account Instructions for Your Sibling: An Adelaide Carer’s Plan for Mum or Dad’s Digital Life

You’re the adult child in Adelaide who took on the practical side of your parent’s affairs — the GP appointments, the My Aged Care portal, the bills that quietly moved to email-only statements. Your brother or sister lives interstate or overseas and helps where they can. Between you, neither of you has a written list of which email addresses your parent actually uses, which cloud account holds forty years of family photos, or which Facebook profile is the active one. The plan is to fix that — for your sibling, so that if you’re not the one available when capacity slips or something happens, they aren’t starting from zero.

The problem

When an aging parent loses capacity or dies, their online life is often the hardest thing to recover. The email account is the master key — password resets, two-factor codes, bank statements, and the executor’s correspondence all run through it — and Australian families routinely lose access to it because no one knew the address, the recovery phone number was an old Telstra mobile, or the provider’s deceased-user process required documents the family couldn’t produce in time. Photos sitting in iCloud or Google Photos become unreachable. A Facebook profile stays live for years because nobody knows whether to memorialise or close it.

ASIC’s MoneySmart estate planning guidance treats a person’s affairs as a coordinated set — wills, powers of attorney, beneficiaries — but most online accounts sit outside any of those instruments. They’re governed by the provider’s terms of service, and each provider’s deceased-user or incapacitated-user process is different. Your sibling doesn’t need your parent’s passwords. They need to know what exists.

What the Asset Instruction Vault does

The Digital Legacy Vault is an asset-instruction register: you record what your parent owns online, where to find it, and who you’ve nominated to receive the instructions. The simplified version (built for individuals and families) records, per account: the provider (Gmail, iCloud, Facebook, Dropbox, a password manager, a loyalty program), the username or identifier, whether a recovery contact has been set up at the provider, and your parent’s preference for what should happen to the account — memorialise, close, download and archive. The Digital Legacy Vault holds instructions about what exists and how your sibling can find it — not passwords, not recovery codes, and not 2FA seeds.

The boundary matters: the Digital Legacy Vault is not a financial product, not a custody service, and not an advice service. It’s an instructions register. That’s what keeps it outside the AFSL regime and outside AUSTRAC reporting. It’s also why the personal information inside it is handled under the Australian Privacy Principles — your parent’s data and your sibling’s contact details are personal information, and the vault treats them that way.

How it works

  1. You sit with your parent (or work from notes you already have) and add each online account to the vault — provider, username, whether a recovery contact and recovery email are configured, and what they want done with the account.
  2. You name your sibling as the recipient for the online-accounts module and they accept; the vault records their consent under the Australian Privacy Principles.
  3. For each account, you record the provider’s deceased-user or incapacitated-user contact path — the URL of the form, the documents that provider typically asks for.
  4. If capacity is lost or your parent dies, your sibling is notified per your release rules and sees only the online-accounts module — not the will, not the super, not anything you haven’t released to them.
  5. Your sibling works the list provider by provider, using your parent’s documented preferences. The vault accelerates the enumeration step — knowing the accounts exist at all — which is the step families most often fail.

Why this matters in Adelaide

Adelaide carers often coordinate across distance — a sibling in Melbourne, Perth, or London — and the practical work of an aging parent’s affairs tends to land on the adult child who lives closest. That asymmetry is fine while you’re the one doing it. It becomes a problem the moment you’re unavailable: travelling, unwell, or grieving. A written inventory of your parent’s online accounts, with your sibling already named as the recipient, means the digital side of the estate doesn’t depend on you being in Adelaide and answering your phone. Photos get recovered. The email account gets closed properly. Facebook doesn’t keep suggesting your late parent as a friend three years on.

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 in Adelaide can register their first online-accounts module on behalf of an aging parent. The Digital Legacy Vault holds instructions about what exists and how your sibling can find it — not passwords, not recovery codes, and not 2FA seeds.