Investment Instructions for Your Sibling: A Melbourne Carer’s Plan for Mum or Dad’s Shares, ETFs and Crypto

You’re the one who turns up to the specialist appointments in Parkville, manages the medication list, and quietly handles your mother or father’s affairs as their capacity declines. Your sibling lives in Brisbane or Perth or overseas, and they trust you — but if something happens to you first, or if you both need to act together when the time comes, they need to know what investments exist. The CommSec account. The two ETFs in a separate broker. The small crypto position from 2017 that nobody has touched since. Right now, only you know.

The problem

Australian estates routinely lose track of investments because no central registry shows everything a person owns. Direct shareholdings sit behind a HIN at one broker; ETFs at another; an old SRN-sponsored holding from a demutualisation in the 1990s; a crypto wallet on an exchange that may or may not still be solvent. ASIC’s MoneySmart estate planning guidance is clear that executors and family members must identify and locate assets before they can be claimed — and ASIC’s crypto guidance highlights that lost keys mean lost coins, with no consumer protection scheme to fall back on.

For a carer of an aging parent, the practical problem is sharper. Capacity loss is gradual. By the time a sibling needs to step in — because you’re unwell, travelling, or because Mum or Dad has moved into residential care and the financial paperwork has multiplied — the window for asking the parent directly has often closed. Your sibling cannot claim, verify, or even rule out what they cannot prove existed.

What the Asset Instruction Vault does

The Digital Legacy Vault is an asset-instruction register: you record what your parent owns, where to find it, and who you’ve nominated to receive the instructions. The simplified version (built for individuals and families) records, per investment: the issuer or broker, the HIN or SRN or exchange account identifier, the approximate holding type (direct shares, ETF, managed fund, crypto), and notes such as which accountant prepares the tax return and where statements are filed.

The Digital Legacy Vault holds instructions about what exists and how your sibling can find it — not your parent’s passwords, recovery phrases, hardware wallet PINs, or exchange API keys. For crypto specifically, instructions without keys cannot recover coins — ASIC’s crypto guidance is unambiguous on that. But instructions are still useful: your sibling can verify what was held, rule out a fruitless search, and avoid spending estate funds chasing assets that are gone.

The boundary matters: Digital Legacy Vault is not a financial product, not a custody service, and not an advice service. That’s what keeps it outside the AFSL regime under Corporations Act Part 7.6 and outside AUSTRAC’s AML/CTF reporting obligations — and it’s why it can be a simple subscription rather than a regulated product.

How it works

  1. You add each investment to the vault — broker or exchange name, account identifier (HIN, SRN, member number, exchange username), holding category, and any notes about tax records or the parent’s accountant.
  2. You name your sibling as the recipient for the investments module and they accept (the vault records their consent under Privacy Act disclosure rules).
  3. You set the release rules — for example, on confirmation of your incapacity, or jointly with the estate solicitor on your parent’s death.
  4. When the trigger fires, your sibling is notified and sees only the investments module — not your other modules unless you’ve released them too.
  5. Your sibling contacts each broker, registry, or exchange directly with the identifier and the appropriate evidence (medical certificate, grant of probate, power of attorney). The vault accelerates the finding step; the institution still runs its own process.

Why this matters in Melbourne

Melbourne families often hold the most layered investment histories in Australia — long-held CHESS-sponsored portfolios at CommSec or NABTrade, ETF positions through newer platforms, a self-managed super fund holding direct equities, plus crypto bought during the 2017 and 2021 cycles. When the active manager of those holdings is an adult child caring for an aging parent in Camberwell or Brunswick or Frankston, the institutional knowledge is concentrated in one person. A clear instruction set — what exists, where, who to call — typically saves an interstate or overseas sibling weeks of broker telephone queues and reduces the chance that a small holding is missed entirely when the estate is finalised.

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 of aging parents in Melbourne can register their first investments module. The Digital Legacy Vault holds instructions about what exists and how your sibling can find it — not passwords, not seed phrases, not hardware wallet PINs, and not the coins themselves.