Digital Legacy Instructions for Your Executor: A Melbourne Carer’s Plan for Your Parent’s Photos, Journals, and Online Life

You’re the adult child organising things for your mother in Melbourne. She’s in her late seventies, still independent, but her memory is slipping and you’ve started thinking about what happens when she’s gone — or sooner, when she can no longer unlock her own phone. Forty years of photos sit on that phone. There’s a Gmail account with another decade of correspondence, a Facebook account that’s become her main link to cousins overseas, and a shoebox of USB sticks under the bed. The executor she named in her will is your brother in Geelong. He’ll need a map, not a mystery.

The problem

When an older Australian dies or loses capacity, their digital life doesn’t just sit on a shelf waiting to be sorted. Phones lock after a few failed PIN attempts. Cloud accounts (Google, Apple, Microsoft) require identity verification that families often can’t provide. Facebook and Instagram have their own memorialisation processes. ASIC’s MoneySmart guidance on wills reminds families that the executor’s job is to identify and administer the deceased’s assets — but digital assets are rarely listed anywhere a will can reach, and an executor who doesn’t know an account exists cannot claim, preserve, or close it.

The result is predictable and painful: Melbourne families regularly lose entire photo libraries because the device PIN was never written down and the cloud-account recovery process needs a driver’s licence the family doesn’t have. The journal your mother kept on her iPad disappears. The voice notes she recorded for the grandkids are gone. None of this is recoverable by the executor without an instruction layer that says: here is what exists, here is where it lives, here is who to contact, here is what she wanted done with it.

What the Asset Instruction Vault does

The Digital Legacy Vault is an asset-instruction register: your mother (with your help) records what her digital life contains, where each piece lives, and who has been named to receive the instructions. The simplified version records, per digital asset: the platform or device, the account identifier or username (not the password), the designated recovery contact already set on the account, the intended fate (archive to family, memorialise, delete, publish), and any notes about which photo albums or journals matter most. Her executor — your brother — is the named recipient for the digital-legacy module and sees only this module, only when release rules are met.

The boundary matters: the Digital Legacy Vault holds instructions about what exists and how your executor can find it — not device PINs, not cloud-account passwords, not recovery codes. The vault is not a financial product, not a custody service, and not legal advice. It’s an instructions register. That is what keeps it outside the AFSL regime under Corporations Act Part 7.6, and outside AUSTRAC reporting obligations — and it’s also why the executor uses these instructions to work with the platforms’ own recovery and memorialisation processes, not around them.

How it works

  1. You sit with your mother and add each digital asset to her vault — her iPhone (model and approximate PIN-hint location, e.g. “written in the back of her address book”), her Gmail, her iCloud, her Facebook, the USB drives in the bedside drawer.
  2. For each platform, you record the designated legacy contact or recovery email she’s already set on the account itself (Apple’s Legacy Contact, Google’s Inactive Account Manager, Facebook’s Legacy Contact). The vault notes what’s set and what still needs setting.
  3. You record her intended fate for each — “archive the photos to a family drive and share with the grandchildren”, “memorialise the Facebook account”, “delete the old Hotmail nobody uses”.
  4. Your brother is named as the recipient for the digital-legacy module and accepts (the vault records his consent, consistent with the Australian Privacy Principles on collecting personal information about third parties).
  5. On release — at death, with a death certificate, per your mother’s release rules — your brother sees the digital-legacy instructions and uses them to approach each platform through its own legitimate executor process.

Why this matters in Melbourne

Melbourne has one of Australia’s largest cohorts of adults aged 75+ caring for digital lives they built later in life — iPads acquired in their sixties, Facebook accounts that became lifelines during the long 2020–2021 lockdowns, photo libraries that span analogue childhood albums scanned in retirement and a decade of grandchildren on a phone. Executors in this city routinely report that the hardest part of administering an estate isn’t the house or the super — it’s the locked phone on the kitchen table. A clear instruction set, prepared while your parent still has capacity, is the difference between a memorialised account and a memory that quietly disappears.

Sources

Join the waitlist

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

We’re opening waitlist access in tranches. Sign up to be notified when carers organising affairs for an older parent in Melbourne can register their first digital-legacy module. The Digital Legacy Vault holds instructions about what exists and how your executor can find it — not your mother’s phone PIN, not her iCloud password, and not her recovery codes.