Online Account Instructions for Your Sibling: A Brisbane Carer’s Plan for Your Parent’s Digital Life

You’re the one in Brisbane who drives Mum to her specialist appointments, who noticed she stopped checking her email last winter, who knows the iPad password is written on a sticky note under the lamp. Your sister lives in Melbourne and would be the next person to step in if your parent loses capacity or dies. Between the two of you, neither has a list of which email address her bank statements go to, which cloud account holds forty years of family photos, or whether the Facebook account is still active. The plan is to build that list now — without writing down a single password.

The problem

An older Australian’s digital footprint accumulates quietly: a Hotmail address from 2003 that still receives utility bills, a Gmail tied to MyGov recovery, a Google Photos library with the only copies of grandchildren’s birthdays, a Facebook account where the cousins post, a password manager nobody else knew existed. When capacity slips or a death occurs, families discover these accounts one missed bill at a time. Provider deceased-user and incapacity processes vary widely; without an inventory and a recovery contact already configured, recovery is often impossible — the photos are simply gone.

Your sibling doesn’t need your parent’s passwords. They need to know which accounts exist, what the username or email identifier is for each one, whether a recovery contact has been nominated, and what your parent wanted done with each account (memorialise, close, download archive, leave alone). That inventory is what turns a frantic search into a phone call.

What the Asset Instruction Vault does

The Digital Legacy Vault is an asset-instruction register: you record what exists, where to find it, and who you’ve nominated to receive the instructions. For online accounts, the vault stores — per account — the provider name, the username or email identifier, whether a recovery contact or legacy contact has been configured at the provider, and your parent’s account-closure preference (memorialise, archive and close, leave dormant). It does NOT store passwords, recovery codes, 2FA seeds, or security question answers. Your sibling sees the inventory you’ve prepared for them, only when you’ve authorised release.

The boundary matters: the Digital Legacy Vault holds instructions about what exists and how your sibling can find it — not credentials, not recovery codes, not the contents of the accounts themselves. That’s what keeps the vault outside the AFSL regime under Corporations Act Part 7.6 and outside AUSTRAC reporting. It’s also why personal information in the vault is handled under the Australian Privacy Principles — both your parent’s information and your sibling’s contact details are personal information governed by the Privacy Act 1988.

How it works

  1. You sit with your parent (or work from what you already know) and add each online account to the vault — provider, username or email, account purpose in one line.
  2. For each account, you note whether a provider-level recovery contact or legacy contact has been set up. Where one hasn’t, the vault flags it as a task — most major providers let you nominate one inside the account settings without sharing a password.
  3. You record your parent’s preference for each account: memorialise, close after archive, or leave.
  4. You name your sibling as the recipient for the online-accounts module and they accept (the vault records their consent).
  5. On a release event (capacity-loss or death, per your release rules), your sibling is notified and sees only the online-accounts instructions — provider names, usernames, and closure preferences — which they take to each provider’s deceased-user or incapacity process.

Why this matters in Brisbane

Brisbane families are often spread along the eastern seaboard — one sibling local, one in Sydney or Melbourne, sometimes one overseas. When a parent in Wynnum or Chermside has a stroke or passes, the local carer is already managing hospital, GP, aged care, and Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal paperwork if guardianship arises. A digital-account inventory prepared in advance means the interstate sibling can take ownership of provider correspondence — chasing Google’s deceased-user form, lodging Meta’s memorialisation request, contacting Apple about a recovery contact — while the local carer keeps doing the physical-world work. Without the inventory, both of you end up doing detective work instead.

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 in Brisbane 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 the accounts themselves.