Investment Instructions for Your Sibling: A Brisbane Carer’s Plan for Your Parent’s Shares, ETFs, and Crypto

You’re the one in Brisbane managing your mother’s affairs — the GP appointments, the My Aged Care assessor, the slow conversations about an advance care directive. Your sibling lives interstate and helps where they can. Between you, the plan is that if your mother loses capacity (or after she dies), the two of you will need to find every share parcel, every ETF holding, the term deposit she opened in 2019, and the small Bitcoin position your father bought before he passed and never explained. You want a single inventory your sibling can open without phoning you in a panic.

The problem

ASIC’s MoneySmart estate planning guidance is clear that assets a family doesn’t know about routinely fail to reach beneficiaries — a will only distributes what the executor can identify. For an aging parent with a fragmented investment history, the gaps are real: a CHESS-sponsored parcel under one broker, an issuer-sponsored parcel with an SRN nobody recognises, a managed fund statement that stopped arriving when she moved into care, and — most painfully — crypto.

ASIC MoneySmart’s crypto guidance is blunt about the consequence of lost keys: there is no central registry, no consumer protection scheme, and no recovery if the seed phrase is gone. For families, that means crypto holdings can be effectively invisible. Without instructions about what existed, the estate either misses the holding entirely or burns money paying a forensic specialist to search drives and emails for something that may not be recoverable anyway.

Your sibling doesn’t need your mother’s broker password or her hardware wallet PIN. They need a list: which broker holds what, which HIN or SRN identifies each parcel, which exchange held the crypto, and which wallet types existed — so they can act, or rule out a fruitless search.

What the Digital Legacy Vault does

The Digital Legacy Vault is an asset-instruction register. The simplified version (built for individuals and families) records, per investment: the issuer or fund name, the broker or exchange, the HIN/SRN/member number, the type of holding (shares, ETF, managed fund, term deposit, bond, crypto), and notes about where supporting documents live. For crypto specifically, the vault holds instructions about what exists and how your sibling can find it — not your mother’s keys, recovery phrases, or hardware wallet PINs. It does not hold any credential, any seed phrase, or any asset itself.

This boundary is deliberate. The Digital Legacy Vault is not a financial product, not a custody service, and not financial advice. Holding only an instructions register is what keeps the vault outside the AFSL regime under Corporations Act Part 7.6, and outside AUSTRAC’s AML/CTF reporting obligations — which is also why it can be a straightforward subscription rather than a regulated product. Your mother’s personal information in the vault is handled under the Australian Privacy Principles.

How it works

  1. Working with your mother (while she has capacity) or under your authority as her attorney, you add each investment to the vault — issuer, broker or exchange, HIN/SRN/account ID, and the holding type.
  2. For crypto, you record what existed and where (exchange name, wallet type, approximate acquisition date) without ever entering keys, seed phrases, or PINs.
  3. You name your sibling as the recipient for the investments module and they accept; the vault records their consent.
  4. You set release rules — for example, release on a verified capacity-loss event or on death. Your sibling sees only the investments module unless you’ve released others.
  5. When released, your sibling uses the inventory to contact each broker, registry, or exchange directly with the relevant identifier and the supporting documents (grant of probate, enduring power of attorney, death certificate). The vault accelerates the finding step; the institutions follow their own processes.

Why this matters in Brisbane

Brisbane families often manage aging parents across distance — one sibling local, one in Sydney or Melbourne, one overseas. Queensland’s Public Trustee and private executors regularly deal with estates where investment holdings surface months after probate, and crypto positions that surface never at all. A clear, sibling-readable inventory — prepared while your parent can still confirm what’s correct — means the two of you spend the difficult weeks dealing with what matters rather than reconstructing a financial history from paper statements and email archives.

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 their first investments module. The Digital Legacy Vault holds instructions about what exists and how your sibling can find it — not your mother’s broker passwords, not her seed phrases, and not her hardware wallet PINs.