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

You’re helping a parent in Brisbane organise their affairs while they still have capacity to tell you what they own. There’s a CommSec account from the early 2000s, an ETF parcel they bought after retiring, a small crypto position a grandchild helped them set up, and no close family nearby — the person they trust to step in is a long-standing friend. The plan is to record what exists and where to find it, so that friend isn’t starting from zero if your parent loses capacity or dies.

The problem

Australian estates routinely lose track of investments because the person managing the wind-up never knew they existed. There’s no central registry of brokerage accounts, ETF holdings, or crypto wallets. ASIC’s MoneySmart guidance on estate planning notes that beneficiaries can only claim assets the executor can identify and prove — and ASIC’s crypto guidance is blunt that crypto holdings can be lost permanently if no one knows the keys or even that the wallet exists.

For your parent’s trusted friend, the problem is sharper. They aren’t family. They don’t have a lifetime of context — they don’t know which broker your parent has used, whether the HIN is held with CommSec or Nabtrade, or whether the crypto sits on an Australian exchange or in a wallet on a USB stick in the desk drawer. Without an instruction set prepared in advance, the friend’s first task is reconstructive archaeology, on a clock, with no authority to demand records.

What the Asset Instruction Vault does

The Digital Legacy Vault is an asset-instruction register. The simplified version (for individuals and families) records, per investment line: the issuer or exchange name, the broker or platform, the account identifier (HIN, SRN, member number, exchange account number), the type of holding (direct shares, ETF, managed fund, crypto, term deposit), and any notes your parent wants the friend to know — such as “the hardware wallet is in the safe; the locksmith has the combination.”

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, not exchange logins, not broker passwords. That boundary is deliberate. It keeps the Digital Legacy Vault outside the AFSL regime (Corporations Act Part 7.6) and outside AUSTRAC’s AML/CTF reporting obligations, because the vault is not a financial product, not custody, and not advice. It’s a list of what’s there and where to look.

For crypto specifically, this still matters even though the keys are not in the vault. ASIC’s crypto guidance reminds families that lost keys mean lost coins — but knowing a wallet existed lets the friend verify the loss, stop searching, and avoid spending estate funds chasing assets that can never be recovered.

How it works

  1. You sit with your parent and add each investment line to the vault — broker, account identifier, issuer, holding type, and a free-text note for the friend.
  2. Your parent names the trusted friend as the recipient for the investments module. The friend accepts the nomination and the vault records their consent (Privacy Act compliance — they know they’ve been named).
  3. Release rules are set: on incapacity (triggered by a nominated medical contact), on death, or both.
  4. If a release event occurs, the friend is notified and sees only the investments module — not the will, not the advance care directive, unless those modules were also released to them.
  5. The friend uses the inventory to contact each broker and exchange directly, providing the account identifier and the appropriate legal documentation (medical authority, grant of probate). The vault accelerates the finding; the broker or exchange still runs their own process.

Why this matters in Brisbane

Brisbane has a large and growing population of retirees whose adult children live interstate — Sydney, Melbourne, north Queensland — and whose closest day-to-day support is often a neighbour, a friend from church, or a long-time bridge partner. When the geographic carer and the legal next of kin are different people, the investment paper trail is exactly where things fall through the cracks: the interstate child assumes the local friend knows about the CommSec account, the friend assumes the child has the records, and neither has the HIN. A vault module addressed to the trusted friend, prepared while your parent still has capacity, closes that gap without anyone handing over a password.

Sources

Join the waitlist

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

We’re opening waitlist access in tranches. Sign up to be notified when carers of aging parents in Brisbane can register a first investments module. The Digital Legacy Vault holds instructions about what your parent owns and where their trusted friend can find it — not the keys, not the recovery phrases, not the hardware wallet PINs.